Story highlights The ban will take effect in early 2018 and will carry criminal penalties

The attachments were found on the guns of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock

(CNN) Massachusetts is the first state since the deadly shooting in Las Vegas last month to ban bump stocks, the gun accessory the shooter used to increase his rate of fire.

Bump stocks became a major source of discussion among lawmakers across the country after the attachments were found on the guns of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, who killed 58 and injured some 500 last month. But talk of banning the devices nationwide appears to have stalled

Beginning in 2018, penalties for the possession or use of a bump stock or trigger crank in Massachusetts will range from probation to life in prison, Representative David Linsky, a Democrat who proposed the amendment, told CNN.

The new law defines a bump stock as "any device for a weapon that increases the rate of fire achievable with such weapon by using energy from the recoil of the weapon to generate a reciprocating action that facilitates repeated activation of the trigger."

In other words, the devices allow semi-automatic rifles to fire more rapidly, similar to automatic weapons. Twelve of them were found on firearms recovered from Paddock's Las Vegas hotel room.

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