Rapid fire
rifle device on special offer in salute to Trump
‘Bump
stock’ used by Las Vegas shooter in promotional tie in with presidential
campaign slogan
Lois
Beckett
@loisbeckett
Sun 18 Feb 2018 23.07 GMT Last modified on Sun 18 Feb 2018 23.09 GMT
There’s a
Presidents’ Day sale on bump stocks, the device the Las Vegas shooter put on
his rifles. Slide Fire Solutions, a bump stocks manufacturer, is offering 10%
off with coupon code: MAGA.
That’s a
salute to the campaign slogan of President Donald Trump, who promised to “Make
America Great Again”, and who has responded to the deadly massacres in the past
five months by continuing to oppose any new gun control laws.
“#HeresToFreedom,”
the company wrote in a marketing email announcing the sale.
Before the
Las Vegas shooting, which left 58 people dead and hundreds injured, bump stocks
were an obscure range device popular with firearms enthusiasts.
The
accessory makes semi-automatic rifles fire faster, mimicking the rapid fire of
fully automatic weapons. Firearms experts say they have no self-defence value,
since they make guns very hard to fire accurately.
After the
Las Vegas shooting, the National Rifle Association and Trump’s White House
expressed some openness to further restricting, if not banning, a dangerous
device used in the worst mass shooting in recent US history. Despite early
signs of bipartisan support for a bump stock ban in Congress, the effort
fizzled out. A handful of states and cities, including Massachusetts and New
Jersey, have passed local bump stock bans.
The White
House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Slide Fire’s
choice to use the president’s campaign slogan as a marketing tactic. It did not
comment on whether the White House now supports or opposes further restrictions
on bump stocks.
A few days
after the shooting, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the
president was “open” to a conversation about what to do about bump stocks and
similar devices. “We would like to see a clear understanding of the facts.”
Slide Fire
did not immediately respond to an email and a phone call seeking comment on
what message it was trying to convey by using President Trump’s slogan as a
marketing device. The small company, based in Moran, Texas, touts its
American-made products.
If the
company had been forced to close after the outrage following the Las Vegas
shooting, “It would hurt the whole town, the school. We pay a very large amount
of property taxes,” Slide Fire founder Jeremiah Cottle, an Air Force veteran,
told the Dallas Morning News in early October. The newspaper reported that the
bump stock manufacturer had once employed about a 10th of the town’s entire
population, and that it remained one of the area’s largest employers.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário