After the school shooting in Florida last week that left 17 people dead, US President Donald Trump has finally made a legislative move towards Gun control. He’s moved to ban bump stocks from circulation, but that’s about it. It won’t prevent further mass shootings – it’ll just slightly limit the dozens of people who are killed in them. Bump stocks are the modifications that Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock added to his weapons to make the rounds fire quicker, thus helping him to achieve the deadliest mass shooting in American history.
It was not the country’s proudest moment when their laws had allowed this to happen, but even the shooting’s more conservative victims called the massacre “the price of freedom” when it comes to US gun laws.
That’s the sort of thing Alex Jones is always on about, and Trump usually spouts things like that, but he’s the one banning the bump stocks. This minor move, with no promise of any further action on gun laws, could be the President taking an opportunity to appease the students of the Parkland high school that was subjected to last week’s shooting.
Trump wants to have his gun cake and eat it, too
The Florida shooting’s victims have been more vocal than the victims of previous shootings, with students as young as 17 years old calling on Trump to push tighter gun control laws and stop school shootings from happening quite so often (as it stands, it’s about once a week that these darn things are taking place), and Trump may be banning bump stocks in an attempt to shut them up without doing anything drastic.
If he bans bump stocks, he might be hoping, maybe the students will pipe down and leave him be, while the money men in the NRA and the other elected Republican officials in Congress won’t be too angry about it.
If this is true, and Trump is only making a minor move to get the best of both worlds – keeping the victims of a school shooting happy as well as , while only really benefitting the latter – then it would be something like his tax cut brags.
He made all these campaign promises about tax cuts during his election campaign, but rather than tackle the big tax issues, he simply made some small tax cuts for big businesses that don’t need it and counted that as a win. In other words, the President wants to have his gun cake and eat it, too.
Trump has got the Justice Department on the case to handle the proposed bump stock ban, but all this will do is stop deranged mass shooters from firing their bullets into crowds of people at quite a rapid rate – they’ll still be able to pick off a fair few.
In response to the outspoken Florida teens, the President admitted that America “can do more to protect our children,” but it can do more than just banning bump stocks. Get the guns out of the hands of mentally unstable teenagers! Then the school shootings will stop! Then kids can go to school feeling safe!
Democrats are nonetheless happy about the move
Officials from the pro-gun control, anti-gun Democratic Party have been rejoicing about the bump stock ban, regardless of whether or not it is a sincere decision based on recent events. They see it as indicative of the gun control debate finally moving in the right direction. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut is happy about Trump’s new memorandum to ban bump stocks, saying that, as he sees it, the debate has reached “a fulcrum point” (read: a watershed moment; come to a head) and it can only get better and brighter from here.
Murphy called the bump stock ban a “small, but vital step” in the left-wing bid for tighter gun control legislation in the US. Okay, it might not be much, but this is the first major decision that Trump has made with regards to the American gun laws, and it’s a decision to ban something that makes the guns more effective, so that can only be a good thing!
