President Barack Obama is to blame for the mechanism that allowed a White male terrorist to transform a semo-automatic gun into a fully automatic rifle before taking deadly aim at thousands of Las Vegas concertgoers on Sunday, Kellyanne Conway told Fox News on Thursday morning.
The once-ubiquitous but recently-scarce White House adviser appeared on Fox & Friends and discussed the controversy brewing over what is more commonly referred to as a “bump stock.” The gun accessory has become central in the obligatory debate over gun control that aways follows mass shootings but rarely enacts any legislative change.
The bump stock “is a device that President Obama’s ATF decided would not be regulated in 2010,” Conway said. And in a way, she’s right. But mostly, she’s wrong.
“The government gave its seal of approval to selling [bump stocks] in 2010 after concluding that they did not violate federal law,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday.
However, Conway’s implication that Obama signed off on legalizing bump stocks is just plain not true.
Congress continually blocked Obama’s attempts to enact tighter gun laws, but that didn’t prevent one of the nation’s biggest gun control groups from giving Obama an “F” on that front.
Still, neither stopped Obama from making the same calls for gun control after all of the mass shootings that took place on his watch.
“There is little more that Obama could have done on gun control,” UCLA law school professor Adam Winkler told Politifact earlier this year. “The president’s power is limited, and the NRA wrote the laws to restrict what the executive can do.”