WASHINGTON (Gray DC) – Wholesale stocks were in the spotlight again on Capitol Hill Wednesday, when members of the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to examine how gun conversion devices make guns deadliest fire.

“I think this device turns a rifle or pistol into a machine gun. We’ve banned machine guns in America for a long, long time, and I think we should do the same for bump stocks,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), chairman of the committee.

Surrogate stocks were previously banned after being used in the 2017 Harvest Music Festival shooting in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. But the Supreme Court then overturned the administrative ban this summer, ruling that it did not comply with federal law and that the ATF had exceeded its authority under the National Firearms Act of 1934.

During the hearing, members of Congress began questioning experts, including a professor, a retired police officer and lawyers, about gun conversion devices and their impact across America .

“These are devices that are used to kill people. They are designed to kill large numbers of people in a very short time. And that’s why it’s so important to regulate them,” said Esther Sanchez-Gomez, litigation director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence Litigation.

Sen. Durbin said lawmakers must now respond to the Supreme Court’s decision with legislative action that would make clear that the nation’s gun law includes bump stocks, in order to make them illegal again.

“This is a serious problem. And it’s not just the case in blue states, it’s in every state. And we want to bring those numbers down and make this a safer country. There are many ways to approach it. One of them is to take the automatic weapons of these mass shooters into our hands,” he said.

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