Matt Valentine is a writer living in Austin, Texas.

For a brief moment after the Las Vegas attack that killed 59 people in October, it seemed as if the country might accept some sort of firearms regulation.

A bill banning “bump stocks”—like the ones Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock used to modify his semiautomatic rifles (increasing their rate of fire to nearly 800-rounds per minute)—had bipartisan support. Even the National Rifle Association suggested the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had erred in approving bump stocks for unregulated civilian sales. Major retailers, including Wal-Mart and GunBroker.com announced they would no longer sell such devices. Slide Fire Solutions, LLC, the premier manufacturer of bump stocks, announced that it was suspending orders.


Appetite for banning the device didn’t last long, though. GunBroker.com lifted its prohibition on selling bump stocks after just two days. As media coverage of the Las Vegas shooting and its aftermath dropped precipitously, the NRA clarified that it wouldn’t actually support a legislative fix, and the bipartisan bill stalled in subcommittee (despite a letter from 33 state attorneys general urging Congressional leaders to pursue the issue). On October 31, Slide Fire began selling bump stocks again.

This is typically where the national reaction to a specific mass shooting—and the specific policy debate it inspires—would end. After grief and outrage come obstruction, apathy and amnesia. (Except, of course, for the survivors.) Public attention has shifted to the next spectacular tragedy—Sunday’s massacre in a Texas church, which has its own circumstances and raises its own policy questions. Meanwhile concerns about bump stocks remain unaddressed.

This time, though, the civil justice system is poised to intercede. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and Eglet Prince Law Firm have filed a class action lawsuit against the makers and sellers of bump stocks, on behalf of survivors who suffered emotional or psychological harm from the attack. The suit alleges that Slide Fire (among other, as-yet-unnamed defendants) recklessly and indiscriminately marketed and sold these products to the public, despite the predictable outcome of a tragedy like the Vegas shooting, and in deliberate disregard for the spirit of longstanding laws banning fully automatic weapons.

It’s normally difficult to win lawsuits against the gun industry for making or selling products that are used to commit crimes. That’s because, in 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which gives firearms and ammunition manufacturers and retailers broad immunities from civil liability. In this instance though, the suit isn’t against a gun manufacturer. In fact, Slide Fire’s founder Jeremiah Cottle took pains to assure his product was not classified as a gun or an integral gun part. In 2010, he sent a prototype of his bump stock design to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, asking them to affirm that his device is not subject to the same laws that regulate firearms. The ATF agreed. In a twist of irony, though, that same ATF evaluation also pushes the bump stock out of the category of “qualified products” that are protected by PLCAA—or at least that’s the foundational theory on which the suit is based.

Without that immunity, Slide Fire faces potentially the largest lawsuit the shooting industry has ever seen. “This is a class that could be over 20,000 people,” says Jonathan Lowy, Vice President of the Brady Campaign’s Legal Action Project. “We expect the damages to be very, very significant.”



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For decades, shooters have improvised techniques to “bump fire” semiautomatic weapons. One method is to hook a thumb through the gun’s trigger guard and through a belt loop, then allow the gun to slide back-and-forth with recoil, causing the trigger to repeatedly “bump” against the thumb. (Many video tutorials demonstrate this technique online.) That method is clumsy though, and doesn’t allow much control over the weapon or where it is aimed. Cottle’s design offered a significant improvement, allowing the shooter to operate the gun from a more traditional firing posture, retaining use of the sights or even a scope.

Under a 1986 law, it is illegal to make an automatic firearm for the civilian market or modify a semiautomatic gun to fire automatically. But in a 2016 interview for the website Ammoland.com, Cottle insisted that guns modified with the Slide Fire stock are not automatic weapons. “An automatic weapons [sic] is one that fires multiple shots with a single pull of the trigger. With the Slide Fire you still have to pull the trigger each time it fires,” Cottle said. “The Slide Fire does not change the mechanics of the firearm it simply enables the shooter to pull the trigger very rapidly.”

That description isn’t quite consistent with the operating instructions Slide Fire provides for their customers. Indeed, you aren’t supposed to pull the trigger with your finger at all. To “bump fire” the gun, it is essential that your finger be firmly pressed against a finger rest that is installed as part of the modification—your other hand pulls the forend of the gun away from your body, “bumping” the trigger against your rigid finger. Then the recoil of the gun, in combination with the forward pressure of your non-shooting hand, allows the weapon to “slide” back and forth repeatedly (hence the brand name), bumping your unmoving finger again and again until you either release the forward pressure or until you’ve emptied a magazine, such as the 50- and 70-round magazines Paddock used when he fired on crowds from the Mandalay Bay hotel.

Slide Fire has been a rising star in the shooting industry since Cottle opened shop in 2010. The company reported $10 million in revenue that first year, and is the largest employer in Moran, Texas, where it is headquartered. Slide Fire has also been a loud, provocative voice in the cultural war over gun rights and gun control. In 2014, the bump stock manufacturer produced billboard advertisements depicting a baseball glove, an apple pie and a modified semiautomatic rifle. Other than the green-and-white Slide Fire logo, the only words on the billboard were “Pure American.” The ads went up in several locations around the country, including one in Chicago’s south side. Under local ordinance, it was illegal in Chicago to buy or sell any of the rifles compatible with Slide Fire stocks, so the advertisement there was unlikely to reach many potential customers. Promoting sales wasn’t the point, though, as Slide Fire spokesperson Laura Shackleford acknowledged in a comment to the Washington Times. “We specifically put the ad up there to show that a firearm is normal Americana,” Shakelford told the Times’ Emily Miller. “We have to stop allowing a small group of anti-gun people dictate how we think about guns.”

Over the years, competitors have emerged with their own bump stock designs, trying to get in on the emerging market for rapid-fire weapons. Slide Fire has sued them out of existence, alleging patent infringement.

But now Slide Fire faces its own potentially existential threat in the courtroom.

“I expect [the defense will] try to make a PLCAA argument in a sense, but it doesn’t apply,” says Brady Center Co-President Avery Gardener. “PLCAA covers firearms and ammunition. A bump stock is not a firearm. A bump stock is not ammunition.”

Gardener says that the implementation of PLCAA hasn’t stopped the Brady Campaign from bringing lawsuits against the gun industry, but it has affected decisions about which cases to pursue. “There are fewer cases that we can bring because of PLCAA,” Gardener says. And the costs are high when they do. It’s a safe bet that anytime a gun manufacturer is sued, their first motion will point to PLCAA and ask the court to dismiss the case. So plaintiffs must invest time and money at the outset, anticipating the motion to dismiss and shaping an argument that the suit should be allowed to proceed, PLCAA not withstanding.

Nobody understands better than Sandy Phillips the challenges and risks of suing the gun industry post-PLCCA. Sandy’s 24-year-old daughter, Jessica Ghawi, was one of 12 people killed in a mass shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 2012. When she learned that Jessica’s killer had purchased thousands of rounds of ammunition online in preparation for the massacre, Sandy and her husband Lonnie filed a lawsuit against Lucky Gunner, the store that had sold it to him.

In their suit, the Phillips had sought only injunctive relief—they wanted the court to order Lucky Gunner to be more cautious about selling bulk quantities of military-spec ammunition. They didn’t ask for financial compensation. “The intent is to bring awareness to this law and to have them change their business practices,” Sandy Phillips says.

That effort didn’t get very far in court. In light of PLCAA and a similar state law, the judge dismissed the suit on the first motion, and ordered the Phillips to pay $203,000 in legal fees for the ammunition retailer. “We fought it off for as long as we could and declared bankruptcy at the beginning of this year,” Phillips says.

The Brady Center’s Jonathan Lowy says that the protections gun manufacturers enjoy under PLCAA are unprecedented. “There is no other industry or group of people in America that has or has ever had immunity from negligence liability. It is a license to engage in unreasonable, dangerous conduct. That’s all it is.”

Even without the obstacle of PLCAA in the Las Vegas suit, Brady will have to make the case that bump stock manufacturers and sellers engaged in some sort of negligence that contributed to the attack. The suit points specifically to correspondence between the ATF’s Firearms Technology Branch (FTB) and Cottle. In a letter, FTB Chief John Spencer systematically addresses each of several points Cottle had raised when he sought the agency’s blessing to make and sell the device. One of those points was the intended purpose of the bump-stock: “Your letter advises that the stock … is intended to assist persons whose hands have limited mobility.”

Robert Eglet, co-counsel in the class action lawsuit against Slide Fire, doubts the notion that the bump stock is a kind of assistive technology for disabled people. “We’ve found no actual marketing material like that they’ve used,” Eglet says. “It was a big lie that this was designed for people who have handicaps. It was designed so that people could turn semiautomatic weapons into machine guns, which are illegal in our country.”

“All of what I’ve seen so far [in marketing materials for bump stocks] is about how much fun it is to evade federal law,” Gardener says. “It certainly would have been less irresponsible if [the makers and sellers of bump stocks] had marketed them in the manner they described to the federal government,” Gardener explains. Essentially, Brady is making the argument that, in order to get approval to bring the bump stock to market, Cottle deliberately misrepresented his product to the FTB as a highly specialized device that would only be useful to a small number of people with a specific type of disability, while actually intending to sell it indiscriminately to the general public.

Indeed, a 2016 interview in Ammoland.com raised the question directly: “Who is the Slide Fire stock geared to?”

“Some people like drag racing, some people like skiing and some people, like me, love full auto,” Cottle answered, lamenting that automatic weapons are prohibitively expensive and require “a mountain of paperwork.” The bump stock, he explained, “brings shooters the same full auto experience but without having to take out a second mortgage on their home.”

No one from Slide Fire responded to requests for comment for this story. Last month, Cottle told local media in Texas that he was “heartbroken” to learn that his product was used in the Las Vegas massacre. But business since Slide Fire resumed online sales has been good. Customers have been told to anticipate long waits due to high demand.

