Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Maker of bump stocks to stop taking orders
LOS ANGELES — The largest manufacturer of bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like automatic firearms, announced Wednesday that it will stop taking orders and shut down its website next month.
The announcement comes about a month after President Donald Trump said his administration would “ban” bump stocks, which he said “turn legal weapons into illegal machines.”
The devices became a focal point of the national gun control debate when they were used in October when a gunman carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
About a dozen bump stocks were found among the weapons used by Stephen Paddock when he unleashed a hail of bullets from his Las Vegas hotel suite, killing 58 people and leaving more than 800 others injured.
Slide Fire Solutions, based in Moran, Texas, posted a message on its website saying the company will stop taking orders at midnight May 20. The firm did not comment further.
The Brady Center for Gun Violence filed a lawsuit against Slide Fire after the Las Vegas mass shooting and alleged that the company “provided a product that turned a semi-automatic gun into the functional equivalent of a machine gun, thereby evading longstanding federal law.”
The Justice Department said last month that it had started the process to amend federal firearms regulations to clarify that federal law defines bump stocks as machine guns.
That would reverse a 2010 decision by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that found bump stocks did not amount to machine guns and could not be regulated unless Congress amended existing firearms law or passed a new one.