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North Texas Maker Of Bump Stocks Will Shut Down Website, Stop Taking Orders In May

Slide Fire Solutions, Inc., makes bump stocks, which allows semi-automatic rifles to fire like automatic weapons. There are calls to ban bump stocks after a dozen such devices were found with the gunman who killed 58 people in Las Vegas.
Christopher Connelly
/
KERA News
Slide Fire Solutions, Inc., makes bump stocks, which allows semi-automatic rifles to fire like automatic weapons. There are calls to ban bump stocks after a dozen such devices were found with the gunman who killed 58 people in Las Vegas.

The North Texas-based maker of bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like a machine gun, has announced it will shut down its website and stop taking orders for the devices next month.

The move by Slide Fire Solutions comes after the Justice Department proposed rule changes last month that will effectively ban the sale, manufacture or possession of bump stocks. No orders will be accepted after May 20, the company said in a notice on its .

Slide Fire is located in Moran, Texas, about 130 miles west of Fort Worth.

A bump stock device was used by the gunman in the mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival in October. The company was accused of negligence and design and manufacturing defects, according to Reuters.

Soon after the shooting, which claimed 58 lives, congressional leaders considered regulating or banning bump stocks. Even the National Rifle Association at the time  said"devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations."

President Trump called on the Justice Department to change its regulations and formally ban the devices in February, following the deadly high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Slide Fire, which was sued by a gun-control group, had temporarily stopped sales after the Las Vegas shooting, but later resumed.

Jeremiah Cottle, the founder of Slide Fire Solutions, invented the device and founded his company in Moran in 2010. The company is one of the small town’s leading employers.

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Molly Evans is the Assistant Producer of Digital News at KERA. She writes, edits and curates news content on KERANews.org. She also maintains the Twitter feed for KERA News. Molly previously served as Digital Coordinator, maintaining KERA’s websites and various digital platforms as well as designing graphics, participating in digital projects and site builds and offering technical assistance to the staff. She has worked at KERA since January 2015. Before KERA, Molly interned with This Land Press in Tulsa, TulsaPeople magazine World Literature Today in Norman and the Oklahoma Gazette in Oklahoma City, where she also freelanced. She also wrote and edited for The Oklahoma Daily, the award-winning student newspaper at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Molly graduated from OU with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a minor in Spanish in December 2014. She was awarded Outstanding Senior in Journalism from the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Molly is a native of Tulsa, Okla.