In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre on Sunday, when Stephen Paddock gunned down 58 people and wounded hundreds more, the National Rifle Association did what it always does. The nation’s leading gun rights group went dark for a few days—not out of respect for the dead, but to wait for the anti-gun outrage to subside and hone its political strategy. Then, on Thursday, the organization did something unexpected: calling for increased regulation of “bump stocks,” legal gun attachments found on twelve of the rifles in Paddock’s hotel room. “The National Rifle Association is calling on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives [ATF] to immediately review whether these devices comply with federal law,” the NRA said in a statement. “The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations.”

Much of the press treated this move as a “surprising” twist in the NRA’s post-tragedy script and a breakthrough in the gun-control debate. CBS News called it “a big deal” because the NRA has spent the past four decades taking “a maximalist approach to the gun debate, and has opposed just about every single gun control measure proposed in that time.” VICE News reported that “Democrats, Republicans, and now—believe it or not—even the National Rifle Association is calling for bump stocks to be more heavily regulated.” (“You know it’s getting real when the NRA says something gun-related needs to be regulated,” VICE subsequently tweeted.) CNBC’s Christina Wilkie tweeted:

WOW:The @NRA, I repeat, the NRA, says bump stocks should be subject to “additional regulations.”

I never thought I’d see this day. pic.twitter.com/0GV8EKoHI2 — Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) October 5, 2017

Lost in all of this astonishment is the fact that regulating bump stocks would have a negligible effect on America’s epidemic of gun violence. As Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat and one of the leading gun control advocates on Capitol Hill, told me on Friday, “This really does little to nothing for the daily gun violence that plagues our country.” Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America after the 2012 Newtown shooting in Murphy’s home state, noted that this week’s massacre was “the only mass shooting I’ve ever heard of that involves a bump stock.” As of Monday, there have been 521 mass shootings in the U.S in 2017, according to The New York Times.

What’s more, it’s not even clear what the NRA is specifically calling on the ATF to do. (The group did not reply to a request for comment.) “We didn’t say ban,” CEO Wayne LaPierre made clear to Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Thursday night. “We didn’t say confiscate.” As The New York Times and many others have noted, the ATF “has ruled that bump stocks do not violate laws that tightly limit ownership of machine guns.” As NBC News explains:

The National Firearms Act, which regulates automatic weapons (called machine guns in the law), mechanically rather than by how rapidly they shoot. “The term ‘machine gun’ means any weapon which shoots...automatically more than one shot...by a single function of the trigger,” the law states. But bump stocks leave the mechanics of a gun untouched and the trigger is still technically activated on each shot, just at a much faster rate than is humanly possible without the modifications. That leaves the ATF with little choice but to deem bump stocks legal under current law, said David Chipman, a former ATF agent.

The NRA’s apparent concession to gun control is instead a ruse with myriad goals— what The Daily Beast’s Gideon Resnick and Sam Stein described as “a master-class of misdirection” that wasn’t really about “acquiescing to political pressures so much as trying to shape them in their favor.”