For better than a year and a half, The Zelman Partisans have been trying to warn gun owners that the bump-fire stock ban was a bigger deal than just that. In late May, we warned that lawyers were taking notice and making this argument in public.

Now they’re arguing in Nevada state court that all semi-automatic firearms are “easily convertible” to machineguns and therefore are machineguns.

Parents of Las Vegas massacre victim sue gun makers and dealers: “These are weapons of war”
As the Parsons later learned, the shooter had used a dozen different rifles, each modified to simulate a machine gun with automatic fire. That allowed him to fire more than a bullet a second.

Machine guns have been banned since 1986. But the lawsuit the couple filed last night claims a gun that’s easily modifiable to fire automatically is a machine gun, and is therefore “flatly illegal” under federal and state law.

This challenge to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act hinges on the bump-fire ban. PLCA doesn’t protect manufacturers when they’ve broken the law, and this argument is that they’ve been unlawfully marketing post-1986 (thanks, VNRA) “easily converted” machineguns to civilians.

If you want to derail this suit, and avoid the otherwise inevitable unpleasantness of an attempted semi-auto ban, you need to support the groups fighting the bump-fire stock (or even rubber bands) ban:

Firearms Policy Coalition and Gun Owners of America Are leading the charge in federal court.

Donate to Firearms Policy Coalition (and enter to win a SIG P320)

Donate to GOA

Please note that I am not recommending any donations to the National Rifle Association. They got us into this mess. And, to date, I can find no indication that they’ve diverted a penny of LaPierre’s wardrobe-and-busty-intern budget to a ban challenge; I’ve not found so much as an amicus brief in someone else’s case.

[Permission to republish this article is granted so long as it is not edited and the author and The Zelman Partisans are credited.]