ALBANY, N.Y. — About an hour after the US Supreme Court overturned a ban on bump stocksNew York Governor Kathy Hochul wrongly said that a gunman who carried out a racist massacre in her hometown of Buffalo had used the weapon accessory that allows semi-automatic rifles to fire as quickly as a machine gun.
Hochul, a Democrat, made the mistake first in a statement emailed to media and posted on a state website Friday, and later in a post on X that has since been deleted.
She falsely said the white supremacist who murdered 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022 used a bump stock. When shooting, the shooter modified a legally purchased semi-automatic rifle to allow him to use illegal high-capacity ammunition magazines, but did not use a bump stock to weapons fire at a faster pace.
“Exactly one month ago, we marked the anniversary of the deadly Buffalo massacre – the horrific day a hate-fueled gunman murdered 10 of our neighbors, using a bump stock to transform his firearm into an even deadlier weapon,” it said. Hochul’s emailed statement. She added that the Supreme Court’s ruling was “a sad day for the families who have lost loved ones in mass shootings.”
Her now-deleted post on
Asked by The Associated Press about the error, a spokesperson for the governor, Maggie Halley, emailed a statement saying Hochul “wanted to report generally dangerous, illegal modifications of weapons that have no civilian purpose and are intended to cause mass casualties such as bump stocks and magazine adjustments.”
The High Council scrapped a federal ban on bump stocks that was put in place after the election deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, when a man in Las Vegas attacked a music festival with guns equipped with bump stocks, firing more than 1,000 bullets into the crowd in 11 minutes. The 2017 shooting killed 58 people and injured more than 800.
The Supreme Court said by a 6-3 vote that the Justice Department had wrongly concluded that bump stocks turned semiautomatic rifles into illegal machine guns. The devices use a firearm’s recoil energy to quickly bump the trigger against the shooter’s finger, simulating automatic fire.
After the mass shooting in Buffalo, Hochul and New York lawmakers passed a series of new firearms laws, including policies to ban on the sale of semi-automatic rifles for people under 21 and restrict the sale of bulletproof vests.
In her statement on the Supreme Court’s decision, Hochul said state leaders are “doing everything we can to end the scourge of gun violence.”
“We expanded our Red Flag laws to ban teens from purchasing AR-15 rifles, and will continue to enforce the 2020 law banning bump stocks in New York. Public safety is my top priority – and I am committed to doing everything I can to keep New Yorkers safe,” she said.