One month after the Las Vegas shooting that claimed the lives of nearly 60 people and injured more than 500, bump stocks are on the market again.
On the night of October 1, Stephen Paddock fired upon a crowd of concertgoers attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival. In the span of 10 minutes, he managed to fire thousands of rounds of ammunition before he eventually took his own life. Among the dozens of weapons found in his 32nd floor suite, police also discovered twelve bump stocks, a device that enables semi-automatic rifles to generate continuous fire, similar to automatic weapons.
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After the shooting, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California introduced a bill that would make bump stocks illegal to sell or manufacture, effectively eliminating them from them market.
“This is the least we should do in the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history,” she said prior to the bill’s introduction. “It should be our highest priority.”
In the wake of the mass shooting, gun enthusiasts fearing that purchasing guns and their accessories would be made more difficult flocked to Slide Fire’s website to purchase bump stocks. Slide Fire, the company who claims to have invented bump stocks in 2005 and owns multiple patents relating to them, saw an increase in traffic so great that their website crashed and they were forced to stop selling the device when their stock ran out.
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In a marketing email sent Tuesday, however, Slide Fire announced that it would be resuming sales of bump stocks again in limited quantities, Bloomberg reported. The announcement comes at the same time that a new bipartisan bill that would limit the sale and use of bump stocks through extensive background checks, registration, and fingerprint scanning was introduced. Slide Fire will also be facing a class-action lawsuit filed by three people who had attended the Route 91 Harvest music festival.
