Bump stock maker to resume sales Cyber Monday

Slide Fire announced a Cyber Monday sale, nearly eight weeks after public backlash against bump stocks skyrocketed demand and depleted the company’s existing inventory. (Photo: Slide Fire Solutions/Facebook)

Slide Fire, the inventor of the now-infamous bump stock, will resume sales Cyber Monday.

The Texas-based company sent an email this week detailing its plan to release a slew of limited inventory starting midnight Nov. 27, warning customers it expects “high traffic volume.”

It’s only the second time in nearly eight weeks Slide Fire has accepted new orders — a side effect of the ongoing public backlash since its flagship product became synonymous with the deadliest mass shooting in recent American history.

Some 58 people died and more than 500 were wounded Oct. 1 when a 64-year-old gunman fired into a country music festival from his hotel suite 32 stories above the Vegas strip. Bump stocks — a legal gun modification known to increase the rate of fire — promptly soared from obscurity into national headlines after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed 12 of the modifiers were found in the shooter’s two-room suite at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

Major retailers, including Walmart and Cabela’s, pulled the devices from store shelves in the days after the shooting. Slide Fire, likewise, suspended new orders on its website for most of the month. In an Oct. 31 email promotion, Business Insider reports the company said it would resume selling a “limited release” of two bump stock models for $179.95. Slide Fire was briefly accepting new orders later that same week, Guns.com previously reported.

The email promotion sent Monday doesn’t specify which of Slide Fire’s products would be available for Cyber Monday — or at what price. In addition to bump stocks, the company sells t-shirts and hats featuring Slide Fire’s “Freedom Unleashed” motto.

The email promotions serve as one of the few communications to come out of Slide Fire since the shooting. Customers on the company’s social media page complained as recently as Oct. 25 about the “lack of transparency” or updates regarding how long the ordering blackout would persist.

In the void left behind by Slide Fire and other retailers, online bids for available bump stocks skyrocketed. Two separate auctions on Gun Broker featured Slide Fire bump stocks that eventually sold for more than $1,500 last month.

Conservative Armory — an online retailer offering bump stocks for AR-15s and AR-47s for $229 — said customers placed nearly 100 orders for the devices two days after the shooting.

“Before this shooting we mostly received inquiry emails from enthusiasts about the bump stocks,” Benjamin Roberts, managing director of Conservative Armory, told Guns.com in the weeks after the shooting. “Put it this way, we’ve sold more in the past 10 days than we have this year.”

Looming congressional threats of tightened gun regulations and widespread anxiety regarding personal safety has triggered an upswing in long gun sales, too, according to federal data.

Dealers processed more than 480,000 National Instant Criminal Background Check applications for long guns in October, eclipsing levels not seen since 2016 — the biggest on record for federal background checks, and by proxy, gun sales.