When Don Boyett was asked if he believes that bump stocks should be banned, he gestured to the moss green SUV in his driveway.

“Let’s take my Ford Expedition here. Let’s say I get drunk and I run over 30 people out in the middle of the road. Are we going to sue Ford and get rid of Ford Expeditions? It’s the person behind the wheel. The same thing with a gun. To me, it’s the person behind that gun that’s at fault. It’s not the gun’s fault,” he said.

Amid the renewed push for gun control after the deaths of 17 students and teachers in a Florida school shooting 11 days ago, Donald Trump last Tuesday told the justice department to issue a ban on bump stocks – attachments that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire at greatly increased rates akin to fully automatic firearms.

The obscure accessory was not a feature of the Florida shooting, but its profile was raised after it was used in the Las Vegas mass shooting last October, which killed 58. Even the National Rifle Association contemplated supporting some restrictions on their use after that, although it opposes an outright ban.

Boyett, however, lives in Moran – a remote, minuscule Texas town 125 miles west of Fort Worth that’s known as America’s bump stock capital thanks to the presence of Slide Fire Solutions. The company was one of the first manufacturers to produce the device and is the best-known.

A bump stock device that fits on a semi-automatic rifle to increase the firing speed, making it similar to a fully automatic rifle. Photograph: George Frey/Getty Images

Population 270 or 233, depending on which road sign you see as you drive in, there is little economic activity in Moran beyond the liquor store, bank, post office and pizza parlour – especially in the past couple of days, when snow and ice blanketed the rolling hills and ranchland around the town, where oil and gas production provides sporadic work.

Boyett is a retired sheriff’s deputy, a job he described as “99% boredom, 1% pure terror”. For self-preservation he assumed that every call he answered involved a weapon until proven otherwise.

Still, he said: “I was a cop 27 years and to me the bad guys, they’re gonna get guns no matter where you go. To me, gun control does nothing but keep guns out of good people’s hands.” A couple of his former law enforcement colleagues, he added, attached bump stocks to their rifles, believing it would help them take down a target more quickly if they ever had to open fire.

Jeremiah Cottle, a wounded air force veteran, founded Slide Fire in Moran, his home town, in 2010. He built an assembly line on family farmland, designing the device and securing government clearance, as well as some key trade patents. Marketing it online, he sold more than $10m worth of equipment in his first year – over 35,000 units – according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

The swift success was “beyond a Cinderella story”, he told a local paper in 2011.

In contrast with the town’s decrepit buildings, Slide Fire – marketing tagline, Freedom Unleashed – has a smart factory in fields next to a graveyard about a mile away, surrounded by high barbed-wire fencing. Cottle could not be reached for comment and has avoided talking to the media since the immediate aftermath of the Vegas shooting, when several reports described him as appearing distraught.

Media attention and criticism has made many here wary of talking to reporters. One man declined to comment, saying that after he was quoted in articles last year, “a bunch of liberal hacks” sent him hate mail. Moran’s mayor turned down an interview request.

A woman in the town who asked not to be named said that the workforce had been “heartbroken” that bump stocks had been used in a mass slaughter, having designed the product for hobbyists – and stung by the vitriol directed at them.

After the Vegas concert deaths the pressure group the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence filed a class-action lawsuit against makers and retailers of bump stocks, arguing they negligently “provided a product that turned a semi-automatic gun into the functional equivalent of a machine gun, thereby evading longstanding federal law”.

Bump stocks, though, were determined not to require federal restrictions by the Obama administration.

And despite Trump’s instruction it remains to be seen whether it will require a law passed by Congress to ban them.

After Trump’s comments the Slide Fire website crashed until Thursday afternoon as a result of “extremely heavy traffic” – a sign that, as is typical whenever weapons restrictions are mooted, customers are rushing to buy while they still can.

For Presidents’ Day last Monday the company offered 10% off with the promotional code MAGA, a reference to Trump’s campaign slogan, Make America Great Again.

Trump may now be poised to put the bump stocks industry out of business in a county where he won 92% of the vote in 2016. But Boyett was sanguine.

“I would disagree with him but I wouldn’t go ape-shit ballistic,” he said. “I like Trump, I do, but he’s trying to please a percentage and unfortunately you can’t please everybody. If that’s what he feels like what needs to be done, sure, OK, no problem. But … they’re looking at it the wrong way, you need to look at the person not at the damn gun.”