The Making of a Millionaire and a Massacre

Five days after the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, Jeremiah Cottle, ashen-faced and unshaven, looks toward the four flags by his company’s front gate in Moran, Texas. There’s the Lone Star State flag, the Stars and Stripes, a POW-MIA one, and another with the green-and-black logo of his company, Slide Fire Solutions LP. Each flies at half-staff just inside a 10-foot-tall fence topped by razor wire. “My family was always here,” he says, motioning across the two-lane highway to the ranch with the Cottle sign out front. “So I built something, and a madman is taking it all away.”

What Cottle built is a multimillion-dollar empire based on the simple idea of converting a semiautomatic rifle into a weapon that can fire up to 800 rounds per minute, about the same as a fully automatic machine gun. The “madman” is Stephen Paddock, who investigators say had 12 so-called bump stocks in the arsenal he used to kill 58 people on Oct. 1 in Las Vegas. Audio recordings captured the extraordinary rate of fire as Paddock shot into the crowd at a country music festival from a room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino. The devices are fully legal in the U.S.