Juxtaposed to the countless gasps of shock and genuine confusion that can be heard bouncing around the echo chamber of media punditry in the wake of the NRA’s concession that bump-stock retrofits may need additional “regulation,” as soon as the surface patina is scratched, the lean assent loses much, if not all, of its lustre. Unlike Speaker Paul Ryan, there are many of us in the disability community who have been aware of these add-ons for years and have been following their degenerative perversion from the day they approved for use by individuals with limited manual dexterity and mobility difficulties in their hands.
In 2010, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives received a letter and diagram of the now-infamous “bump-stock” kit. The retrofit was meant for individuals who have limited mobility in their hands or who have difficulties pulling the trigger multiple times. Many detractors may not grasp why someone with such limiting factors would even want to hunt, shoot, or fire a gun, but many persons with disabilities are avid outdoor sportspeople. There are specialized wheelchairs designed for hunting and trekking through woods and brush, adaptive crossbows, lifting tree stands, and add-ons that allow hunters with severe disabilities to fire their weapons by blowing through a straw. Simply put, if it’s a right to own and utilize guns, the right must be extended to people with disabilities.
As a result, much of the mystery behind the ATF’s failure to regulate bump-stocks from that first letter is quickly solved. As the letter states, “The stock has no automatically functioning parts or springs and performs no automatic mechanical function when installed.” It goes on to summarize their purview in light of this fact, “the ‘bump-stock’ is a firearm part and is not regulated as a firearm under Gun Control Act or National Firearms Act.” In short, that’s not their department. There was nothing they could do. It’s flatly disingenuous to say “Obama authorized” this part; it simply cannot be regulated by the ATF, and even if it could, it’s an add-on for people with disabilities and was proposed as a technically valid mobility device.
Delving a bit deeper, despite the fact that it was Pres. George H.W. Bush who signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law in 1990, the GOP has been pushing back against implementation and the law’s enforcement ever since. In the 27 years since it was rolled out to initial bipartisan support, there have been countless efforts from the right to curtail individual rights and freedoms of people with disabilities (PwD) and to even halt them from exercising the scope of the ADA. The president himself has a long and storied history of flagrantly violating the ADA; his Trump Taj Mahal had such egregious conditions that the federal government stepped in and sued him directly. He settled, naturally – as is his wont – but there are few Americans who didn’t see him mock the physical movements of a well-known reporter, Serge Kovaleski. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) has introduced at least two concerted efforts into the House to severely slash major aspects of the ADA and gut many of the rights and recourses currently a part of the lives of disabled Americans.
One of those efforts, H.R. 620, is awaiting vote in the House and has 50+ cosponsors, the vast majority of whom are Republican. The apparent GOP consensus of “Businesses are People, too!” has overtaken the fact that individuals actually are people. The issue is that these two vistas cannot co-habitate harmoniously. Adapting businesses to PwD costs money. Businesses want to cut costs they view as superfluous. If the ADA isn’t being enforced and there is no detriment to violating the ADA, why spend the money to be ADA compliant? That’s when PwD have the right to sue for injunctive relief and obtain necessary changes to structure or policy; however, that’s exactly what Republicans want to stop. Since the current Department of Justice won’t even bring the Department of Justice up to ADA compliance, there’s no reason to believe the department in charge of justice has any real interest in justice at this time.
When these two factors are married together and the GOP’s disinterest in the disability community (or distaste for it) and the desire to ensure that there are more guns than people here in the U.S., is it really a lofty stretch of the imagination that “bump-stocks” are getting the bump, whereas the much needed discussion on comprehensive gun control is being deemed, “premature”?