Washington • In the days after a gunman shot and killed 58 people on the Las Vegas Strip, officials inside the Justice Department scrambled to address a question thrust to the center of public debate: Could anything be done to regulate the device that enabled the shooter to fire his weapons as though they were automatic?
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had years earlier decided it could not under existing law restrict the device, known as a bump stock. But the agency was being asked by the Trump administrationto reconsider.