Prescott ET AL v. Slide Fire Solutions

Following the deadliest mass shooting in American history that took place in Las Vegas at the 91 Harvest Festival, the Brady Center and Las Vegas law firm Eglet Prince filed a suit against Slide Fire Solutions, LP and other sellers, manufacturers, and marketers of bump stock devices. The lawsuit is on behalf of festival goers who suffered emotional distress as a result of the shooting and asks the defendants to pay for the costs associated with counseling and other treatment. Punitive damages are also asked for since the bump stock, evading federal law, turned a semi-automatic gun into the functional equivalent of a machine gun.

The lawsuit alleges that Slide Fire Solutions, LP was negligent in developing and marketing "bump stocks" to the general public without any reasonable restrictions, thereby subverting federal law that has highly regulated automatic fire guns for over 80 years. According to the Complaint, "this horrific assault would not and could not have occurred, with a conventional handgun, rifle, or shotgun, of the sort used by law-abiding responsible gun owners for hunting or self-defense." The complaint goes on to allege that the damage caused to the plaintiffs, "resulted from the military-style arsenal that the defendants manufactured, marketed, and sold to the public, without any reasonable measures or safeguards."

Bump stock devices were created by Slide Fire Solutions, LP. In a 2010 letter to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms Explosives ("ATF"), Slide Fire wrote that the bump stocks were intended to assist "persons whose hands have limited mobility." However, Slide Fire's inventor of the bump stock, in a 2016 interview with AmmoLand, Jeremiah Cottle stated later, that the bump stock was geared toward "people like me, who love full auto." The complaint alleges that plaintiffs are unaware of bump stocks actually being marketed or sold only to people whose hands had limited mobility. The complaint alleges that Slide Fire grossed more than $10 million in sales of bump stocks in 2010. According to Cottle, a semi-automatic rifle may cost between $800 and $1,200, while a fully automatic model can run more than $15,000.