Route 91 Harvest Festival Victims File Lawsuit Against Manufacturer of ‘Bump Stocks’

Ryan J. Farrick — October 11, 2017

A bump stock for a semiautomatic rifle. Image via George Frey/Reuters.

A group of people who attended the Route 91 Harvest Festival have banded together to sue a manufacturer of firearm ‘bump stocks’.

The perpetrator of the October 1^st mass shooting in Las Vegas, Stephen Paddock, had amassed a considerable arsenal of weapons in his Mandalay Hotel suite. Several of Paddock’s semi-automatic rifles were equipped with bump stocks – legal devices which harness a firearm’s recoil to achieve higher rates of fire.

Used properly, a bump stock allows a semi-automatic weapon to be fired essentially as if it’s automatic.

The use of such an accessory allowed Paddock to kill 58 people and injure over 500 more.

“Paddock could not have injured so many people without a bump stock,” alleges the complaint, filed Friday in the Clark County District Court by the Eglet Prince law firm. “Paddock may not have launched his military-style assault without a bump stock. There are people who were killed, injured, and suffered emotional distress who would not have been, if Paddock had not possessed a bump stock.”

So far, three people have been named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Fire Solutions, a company which manufactures and retails bump stocks. The suit is being filed on behalf of the three named plaintiffs as well as all the other attendees and victims of the shooting.

The plaintiffs are, according to Fox 59, suing the company for product liability, negligence, emotional distress and public nuisance.

“This horrific assault did not occur, could not occur, and would 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 alleges. “The damage caused to plaintiffs resulted from the military-style arsenal that defendants manufactured, marketed, and sold to the general public, without any reasonable measures or safeguards, and which the killer foreseeably used to such horrific results.”

Fire Solutions, on its part, is no longer taking orders – a decision the company explained as having been made to provide better service to individuals who own its products.

The lawsuit was announced after the National Rifle Association said Thursday that it supports a federal review of bump stocks, to see whether their usage and sale is in line with existing law.

The NRA is expected to lobby against a congressional review, preferring instead to have any decision made by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – and therefore keeping the issue of gun control and firearms regulation out of public sight.