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The Department of Justice on Tuesday made official new regulations to make bump stocks illegal. The move makes sense, even though it isn’t likely to make a major difference in combating mass shootings.

Bump stocks are an attachment that can make semi-automatic weapons capable of rapid fire by taking advantage of the recoil after firing a gun, causing it to move quickly back and forth as the shooter’s finger rests on the trigger. They are not particularly widespread and over the years were mainly a niche item that some gun hobbyists used for recreational purposes. They received national attention after the Las Vegas shooting, when Stephen Paddock used the attachments to help him unleash an avalanche of bullets on a crowd, killing 58 people.

Under the new regulations, bump stocks will be considered “machine guns” for the purposes of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives rules.

The change makes sense. The federal government goes to great lengths to restrict the availability of machine guns. It is illegal to own any fully automatic gun manufactured after 1986, and acquiring one manufactured before that is typically prohibitively time consuming and expensive and requires significant background checks and registration.

Given how much effort the ATF goes through to restrict machine guns, it makes sense that it would also ban parts such as bump stocks that can allow a relative novice to turn a semi-automatic gun into a weapon that roughly approximates a machine gun. After Las Vegas, even the National Rifle Association suggested that the ATF consider updating regulations on bump stocks, arguing, “The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations.”

Doing this within the confines of clarifying existing regulations also avoids a scenario of Congress writing a law pitched as a ban of bump stocks that is written in a way that allows for broader regulation of semi-automatic guns.

While the move makes sense, it also shouldn’t be seen as something that is going to have much of an effect on mass shootings. In nearly all cases, bump stocks would be pretty useless as they make guns a lot less accurate.

The Las Vegas tragedy was unique in the sense that somebody was shooting on a large crowd from above, about 1,200 feet away, so he wasn’t aiming at any specific person, but rather was firing off as many rounds as possible toward a general area to maximize the carnage. So that was a rare instance in which having access to bump stocks probably increased the death toll. But the attachment would be unlikely to help shooters in other cases.

UPDATE: As Robert VerBruggen and Steve Gutowski point out, pursuing this action by regulation rather than through an act of Congress, the Trump administration is opening itself up to legal challenges. The issue is that regulations define a machine gun as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” While the bump stock can approximate automatic fire, it still requires multiple pulls of the trigger.