The little-to-no sympathy list addition: Jeremiah Cottle

I’m generally a pretty sympathetic person, but I do have a list of those for whom I feel no sympathy. Donald, Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric are on the list. Tiffany and Barron are not. Melania hovers between the no sympathy and the sympathy lists. I get all sympathetic for her – can you imagine being married to him? – and then I remember that she defended birtherism. So, mostly, no.

It’s good to take a fresh look at the list every once in a while, to make a few deletes and adds. So today I’m adding Jeremiah Cottle.

Unlike the above crew, with whom we’re all on a first name basis, Jeremiah Cottle requires some explanation.

Cottle is the inventor of the bump stock, the wonderful little device that was used by Las Vegas massacre psychopath Stephen Paddock to convert his semiautomatic rifle into a full-on machine gun.

“I built something,” Cotter gripes, “And a madman [that would be Paddock] is taking it all away.” (Source: Bloomberg)

Oh, boo hoo.

The something that Cotter built is a company called Slide Fire®. It’s motto – FREEDOM UNLEASHED – might just was well be LIFE TAKEN AWAY, but at Slide Fire®: 

We are proud to offer products that are made here in the United States and assembled by hard working Americans…Jeremiah Cottle, inventor and President of Slide Fire®, honorably served our country via the United States Air Force for 9 years…The honor, commitment, and perseverance that is practiced in our US Military, is carried over to the core beliefs and practices of our company.

Well, guess he won’t be taking a knee anytime soon.

But that’s fine. Who’s going to argue with honor, commitment, and perseverance as core values, even though it’s all in the definition. (I won’t go into what I think “hard working Americans” stands for.)

Cottle thought up the bump slide in 2005 – “a device that uses a rifle’s recoil, or bump, against a stiffened trigger finger to approximate automatic fire.”

By mid-2010, Cottle was ready to start selling his device, but he first needed clearance from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. To comply with federal law, he simply needed to demonstrate that the bump stock was itself not a machine gun. In a letter to the ATF, Slide Fire argued that its product was an accessory to help people with disabilities who had difficulty firing the AR-15, a semiautomatic civilian version of the M-16 military assault rifle.

Who knows if the ATF bought that bit about the bump stock being an accessory for those with disabilities. Seriously, folks. If someone’s too disabled to fire an AR-15, maybe they shouldn’t be given access to something the equivalent of a fully automatic? Anyway, the ATF ruled that the bump stock is an accessory, not a firearm. Thus, they’re unregulated, unregistered, and maybe unprotected from immunity when sued.

Once it hit the market, the Slide Fire bump stock took fire. First year sales were $10-plus million. That’s the last year that sales figures were released for, but life has been good. And at first, the Las Vegas Massacre looked like it was going to turn things from good to great. Lots of gun people wanted what Stephen Paddock had and, naturally, they feared that the nanny-staters would probably start to try to restrict purchase. So, gimme bump stocks. On the secondary market, prices nearly doubled, then more than tripled, the typical retail price of $179.95.

But things go overwhelming, and Slide Fire had to put a halt to sales, not just for bump stocks, but for gear like this Pure American tee shirt. In case you can’t see, hot dogs and Chevrolets have been dropped from the equation of what goes together, in the good ol’ USA, and the high-powered rifle added.

Meanwhile, there are concerns that the bump stock might become at least quasi-regulated. Even the NRA was making mild little moo-moo noises about it. Regulation won’t be good for Stock Fire. In fact, it might be too little, too late to save them. That’s because Stock Fire got itself into something of a Catch-22.

Because bump stocks are an accessory without functioning mechanical parts, the company may fall outside the protections of a 2005 federal law shielding gun and ammunition makers from being held liable for gun violence. On Oct. 6 three victims of the shooting filed a class-action suit against Slide Fire and unnamed manufacturers, accusing the industry of negligence. “Paddock could not have injured so many people without a bump stock,” the complaint states.

Cottle says that he’s received death threats, and that “people are coming after my kids.” No, he doesn’t deserve death threats, and leave those poor kids alone.

But surely someone who used the con of helping disabled gun enthusiasts to shoot faster to get the ATF to okay his invention is deserving of a place on my no sympathy list.

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence is behind this suit, and they’re arguing that the bump stock shouldn’t get the immunity the guns and ammo do. See you in court, Jeremiah Cottle. Because if there’s one thing that’s as Pure American as baseball, apple pie, and turning semi-automatics into automatics, it’s the law suit.