Conservative Armory: Bump stock demand ‘overwhelming’

One of the few vendors still selling bump stocks said Tuesday demand has been “overwhelming” since the Las Vegas shooting.

Conservative Armory — an online retailer offering bump stocks for AR-15s and AR-47s for $229 — said customers placed nearly 100 orders for the modification devices Oct. 3 after a lone gunman rained bullets down into a crowded country music festival from a high rise hotel on the Las Vegas strip two days earlier, killing 58 and wounding 489 others.

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

Bump stocks, legal devices that mimic automatic gunfire, made headlines last week after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed 12 of the modifiers were found in 64-year-old Stephen Paddock’s two-room suite on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay and Casino.

Typically retailing for as little $99, major retailers — including Walmart and Cabela’s — pulled the devices from shelves in the days after the shooting. SlideFire Solutions, a Texas-based bump stock manufacturer, temporarily halted new orders. Requests for comment from all three companies went unanswered last week.

The devices face an uncertain future as congressional Republicans express a willingness to re-examine current federal regulations for bump stocks — a sentiment echoed, in part, by the National Rifle Association last week.

“We didn’t talk about banning anything,” Chris Cox, NRA-ILA’s executive director, told Tucker Carlson during an interview last week on Fox News. “We talked about the ATF going back and looking at if these (bump stocks) comply with federal law.”

“Fully automatic weapons have been banned for a long time, apparently this allows you to take a semi-automatic and turn it into a fully automatic, so clearly that’s something we need to look into,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday.

Meanwhile, online bids for bump stocks skyrocketed to more than $800 over the weekend. Two separate auctions on Gun Broker feature Slide Fire bump stocks for $830 and $755, respectively. Half a dozen users placed bids on the cheaper, left-handed version while the more expensive listing attracted 15 bids as of Sunday. It sold Tuesday for $1,575 after 19 bids.

Roberts told Guns.com he expects demand for his store’s remaining supply of bump stocks won’t slow anytime soon as Congress mulls a bipartisan-backed ban and a class action lawsuit against bump stock manufacturers, including Slide Fire Solutions, pends in Clark County, Nevada.

“We’ve had a great deal of support over the past week from our customers, but we’ve also received several vitriolic emails from those falsely accusing us as a ‘brand who attempt to market off a tragedy,’” he said. “Our goal isn’t to ‘market off a tragedy,’ as our company is veteran owned. Our goal is to preserve the 2nd Amendment.”

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