NRA Bumping Up Bump Stocks
The NRA has used fear mongering tactics directed at its members to drive donations with tremendous success over the years. Following the election (and re-election) of Barrack Obama, fear drove gun owners to scramble in an effort to stock pile ammunition and firearms prior to government attacks on the rights of gun owners that never came. In the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, the NRA has taken the rare position of recommending legislation to control the availability of “bump-fire” stocks that effectively transform semiautomatic firearms into fully automatics. The NRA predictably blamed the Obama Administration for failing to guide legislation controlling the sale of bump-fire stocks before suggesting that they would support such legislation. The mere mention of NRA support for future legislation has caused the “value” of bump fire stocks to increase 300% in a matter of days.
Five days after the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, Jeremiah Cottle, ashen-faced and unshaven, looks toward the four flags by his company’s front gate in Moran, Texas. There’s the Lone Star State flag, the Stars and Stripes, a POW-MIA one, and another with the green-and-black logo of his company, Slide Fire Solutions LP. Each flies at half-staff just inside a 10-foot-tall fence topped by razor wire. “My family was always here,” he says, motioning across the two-lane highway to the ranch with the Cottle sign out front. “So I built something, and a madman is taking it all away.”
What Cottle built is a multimillion-dollar empire based on the simple idea of converting a semiautomatic rifle into a weapon that can fire up to 800 rounds per minute, about the same as a fully automatic machine gun. The “madman” is Stephen Paddock, who investigators say had 12 so-called bump stocks in the arsenal he used to kill 58 people on Oct. 1 in Las Vegas. Audio recordings captured the extraordinary rate of fire as Paddock shot into the crowd at a country music festival from a room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino. The devices are fully legal in the U.S.The story of how Cottle successfully navigated America’s gun laws to sell tens of thousands of bump stocks over the past six years says a lot about how permeable those laws are. It also sheds light on the protections federal law affords the gun industry against claims of liability when firearms are put to horrific use. Ironically, the argument Slide Fire used to get approval for its bump stocks may end up exempting it from those protections—an argument being used in the lawsuits that are already being filed by victims of the Las Vegas shooting. The sheer horror of the massacre, combined with the revelation that a simple device likely made the carnage much worse, seems to have altered the debate about gun violence, eroding Republican resistance to discussing gun control of any kind, if only temporarily.
