Slide Fire Solutions, the company that made the bump stocks used in the Route 91 Harvest music festival shooting in Las Vegas — the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history — has announced that it has reopened and is once again selling the devices. Slide Fire previously shuttered in 2018, before the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) finalized a rule that banned bump stocks in March 2019. But this past June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the ATF rule, legalizing bump stocks again in a majority of states.
To learn more about bump stocks and how they allow AR-15s and AK-47s to fire up to 800 rounds per minute, click here.
The return of slide fire
The “About” page on the new Slide Fire website states that “after 6 years of waiting; the Supreme Court of the United States has lifted the unconstitutional ban that put our veteran owned business…out of business. Let’s get back to work!!!” The page also notes that the company’s founder, Jeremiah Cottle, who owns the patent for bump stocks, is “[s]till wondering how a Bump Stock ban, a product that doesn’t shoot bullets, remedied a gun violence problem.”
The website’s homepage features a video of a man firing an AR-15 with a bump stock installed at an incredibly high speed under the headlines “Bump stocks are back” and “Prepare to change the way you play.” The site urges customers to “Be Safe” and “Have Fun” below a video of people firing bump-stock-equipped AR-15s and AK-47s — and detonating exploding targets.
The homepage also features a slow-motion video illustrating how a bump stock allows a shooter to continue firing an AR-15 by simply pulling forward on the front half of the gun. The gun’s recoil causes the trigger to repeatedly bump into the shooter’s stationary trigger finger, as discussed here.
Fueling Conspiracy theories
Slide Fire’s new Instagram account, which appears to be run by Cottle himself, is deeply problematic as well. For example, one video shared on the account compares audio recordings of the Las Vegas mass shooting to suggest that the shooter used an M240 belt-fed machine gun instead of multiple AR-15s equipped with bump stocks. Not only does this conspiracy theory contradict official police records and crime scene photographs, but it also implies that the Las Vegas shooting was a “false flag” operation carried out by the U.S. government, as civilians do not have access to such military machine guns.
In another Instagram video, Cottle claimed that the gunfire at the Las Vegas shooting “sounded very much like an M60,” another U.S. military machine gun, before contradicting himself by saying it “sounded like a [M]240 to me.” In that same thread, Cottle said that he was “very tired of being blamed for something I didn’t do. There are so many questions about that night and no one seems to care about that but they crushed my veteran owned company instead.” There is no “question” that 14 AR-15s equipped with bump stocks were recovered from the shooter’s hotel rooms, however.
The video is one of three shared by the Slide Fire account featuring a man in a Hawaiian shirt firing AR-15s equipped with bump stocks. Hawaiian shirts have become the unofficial uniform of boogaloo extremists who want to violently overthrow the government.
In another Instagram post, Cottle is shown wearing a T-shirt with “Stop Government Overreach” printed on the back. He also used Instagram and YouTube to highlight an interview, filmed before the Supreme Court announced its decision in Garland v. Cargill, in which he claimed that by enacting the bump stock rule, the ATF and “the executive branch” had decided to “do whatever they want, to change the rules however they want, without changing the law, and that’s dangerous.” The clip ends with Cottle holding an ammunition canister and offering a threat: “It’s going to be game on.”
dangerous practices
Instead of demonstrating safe gun handling practices, Slide Fire’s Instagram and YouTube videos show people firing assault weapons as quickly as possible — sometimes uncontrollably. In one video, an 83-year-old woman fires dozens of rounds from a bump-stock-equipped AK-47, but several of her shots completely miss the target. When a commenter asked the host in the Hawaiian shirt above to first show that his rifle is unloaded and safe to operate “to promote safe use,” the host responded with “just pull the trigger and if it fires that means it’s off safe.”
While YouTube explicitly states that it prohibits content providing “instructions on how to convert a firearm to automatic or simulated automatic firing capabilities,” Slide Fire recently uploaded a video to the site showing people how to install a bump stock in less than 90 seconds, in addition to several other videos showing users how to operate bump stocks.
Finally, Slide Fire’s most recent YouTube video shows that the company will continue creating rapid-fire devices. In the video, a shooter uses a “Bump Pistol Grip Prototype” to bump-fire an AR-15 without a stock and fire an entire magazine’s worth of ammunition in seconds. The prototype appears to operate like the Hellfire Gen 2 device that the Uvalde mass shooter carried into Robb Elementary School.
