As much as USA is pro-gun, I thought automatics are not sold?
Regardless as the other comment says, firing on full auto is a waste of ammo. Back in service our first range practice we were given the Rambo-fantasy; hip firing at full auto at 10 metres out. No one hit any of the targets. It was a lesson to us that firearms, as easy as they are to use, needed at least some skill to be effective.
Caveat: There are ways to simulate full automatics (e.g. bump stock), and also some guns can be converted into full automatic.
Trump banned bump stocks. It’s the only gun control that’s held up in court in around 20 years.
Full auto guns can be purchased. Most often they’re prior 80s ban guns. They’re older generally, although there are some newer full auto guns that have been hitting the market lately. They all require you to have full background checks and they’re serialized to match. The ATF is the one though that you have to register through to legally acquire one and from what I’ve heard it’s kind of a bitch to get approval on them (as it should be).
How have there been newer full-auto weapons on the market? I thought everything registered after 1986 was banned (not technically, but the ATF wouldn’t approve the tax stamp to register anything after 1986).
For the general public, there aren’t. If you want a machine gun of new manufacture, you have to go through the whole process to be licensed as a manufacturer, SOT, FFL type whatever. I forget exactly. And you have to show you’re actually doing business to get and keep that license.
Technically no. You can still get a fly automatic but they are expensive as hell. A cheaper solution would be a bump stock but that is even less accurate than an automatic. You could also illegally build your own.
As for ability to hit targets, how close together and how many were the targets? If it is a few targets spread out over 10-20 meters, yeah going full auto is going to miss a lot. Having dozens of people packed into a small area makes accuracy less important.
What’s a bump stock? Went to read about them; the inventing company has stopped making them, are they still easy to get?
They popped up the range targets, so not as tight as a packed crowd, but you’d think at least one would get hit. My impression was that it was really hard to control the recoil making the barrel going up, so most of my rounds just went over the targets.
They were banned by the Trump administration.
Yes they are significantly harder to aim than an actual automatic firearm, which is significantly harder to aim than a semi-automatic firearm, but if you’re firing into a crowd of people indiscriminately, such as the Las Vegas shooter, it doesn’t particularly matter.
As much as USA is pro-gun, I thought automatics are not sold?
It’s complicated. The short answer is yes, but there are a couple of ways you can get them.
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Buy a REALLLY old one for tens of thousands of dollars.
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Become a licensed federal firearms dealer (FFL).
Alternatively you can do it the easy way and make an auto-sear out of some scrap metal. Because if you’re murdering dozens of people indiscriminately you’re probably not terribly concerned about an extra charge for an unlicensed automatic firearm.
