...but not for sale prices! While perusing the news on the Fox News and One America News Network websites yesterday, I saw a bunch of headlines referencing what the media calls "bump stocks" which are better known (at least to me) as 'bump fire stocks'. I guess that the numerous media references to these stocks is to be expected considering that the evil dirtbag in Las Vegas had several rifles outfitted with them. There has been an awful amount of balderdash about how they convert a semi-automatic into a fully automatic weapon. In fact that is not what a bump fire stock accomplishes as you still need to activate the trigger one trigger squeeze for one shot which a bump fire stock allows the shooter to do at a very high rate as opposed to a full auto weapon with which you pull the trigger once and it keeps firing long as the trigger is held back. With that and with all the bad press and with the bad mouthing they have been receiving from politicians who usually want to blame the object and not the person misusing it, I took a look online to see how much their prices had jumped because - I was sure they had indeed gone up in price quite a lot.
Two websites of manufacturers of them apparently had none available for whatever reason. I suspect the reason is that they have discontinued selling them because of all the bad press and because they are afraid someone may purchase one or more and commit a copycat act of heinous violence. Of course, they really may be out of stock too as I am guessing they are selling like crazy. One of those company's sites simply said: "We have decided to temporarily suspend taking new orders in order to provide the best service with those already placed." That was SlideFire.com. When I tried to access the other site, BumpFireSystems.com, I received this error message: "HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable". I tried them several times yesterday and today with the same result. AtlanticFirearms.com, a retailer of SlideFire.com products, had bump fire stocks advertised but stated they were out of stock and expected more to come into stock. Their advertised price was $149.95. Before the Vegas shooting, that had been the going price as far as I am aware. I guess being out of stock, or claiming to be out of stock, or not having the website available was to be expected.
After trying those three websites, I also ran a search for 'bump fire stock' on GunBroker.com. What I found there, I suppose, was also to be expected and that was in the form of the price increases I had imagined would come due to the late notoriety of these devices. There were several for sale on GunBroker, both new and used. Some of them had reasonable minimum opening bids such as $99.00. There is no reserve on that one. Others though had required opening bids of as high as $699.00 and maybe some were higher. Now, if you doubt that these will sell at such inflated prices like that, I also took a look at some auctions that already had bids and found one that had had a minimum starting bid of $300.00. That one also already had a bid of $1,025.00 placed on it for a single bump fire stock! See it here before the listing closes in about 44 minutes from me writing this. It's selling for about 6.8 X it's original retail price and that folks is crazy. I guess it is like Ralph Kramden once said though, it's: "a mere bag of shells" (at least to some folks). The free market is a good thing, especially when you have what others want badly enough and they are willing to spend, spend, spend!
And yes, of course, I bid on one but just for shits & giggles as we used to say. My starting bid was .01 cent and my maximum bid was $50.00.
All the best,
Glenn B
Two websites of manufacturers of them apparently had none available for whatever reason. I suspect the reason is that they have discontinued selling them because of all the bad press and because they are afraid someone may purchase one or more and commit a copycat act of heinous violence. Of course, they really may be out of stock too as I am guessing they are selling like crazy. One of those company's sites simply said: "We have decided to temporarily suspend taking new orders in order to provide the best service with those already placed." That was SlideFire.com. When I tried to access the other site, BumpFireSystems.com, I received this error message: "HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable". I tried them several times yesterday and today with the same result. AtlanticFirearms.com, a retailer of SlideFire.com products, had bump fire stocks advertised but stated they were out of stock and expected more to come into stock. Their advertised price was $149.95. Before the Vegas shooting, that had been the going price as far as I am aware. I guess being out of stock, or claiming to be out of stock, or not having the website available was to be expected.
After trying those three websites, I also ran a search for 'bump fire stock' on GunBroker.com. What I found there, I suppose, was also to be expected and that was in the form of the price increases I had imagined would come due to the late notoriety of these devices. There were several for sale on GunBroker, both new and used. Some of them had reasonable minimum opening bids such as $99.00. There is no reserve on that one. Others though had required opening bids of as high as $699.00 and maybe some were higher. Now, if you doubt that these will sell at such inflated prices like that, I also took a look at some auctions that already had bids and found one that had had a minimum starting bid of $300.00. That one also already had a bid of $1,025.00 placed on it for a single bump fire stock! See it here before the listing closes in about 44 minutes from me writing this. It's selling for about 6.8 X it's original retail price and that folks is crazy. I guess it is like Ralph Kramden once said though, it's: "a mere bag of shells" (at least to some folks). The free market is a good thing, especially when you have what others want badly enough and they are willing to spend, spend, spend!
And yes, of course, I bid on one but just for shits & giggles as we used to say. My starting bid was .01 cent and my maximum bid was $50.00.
All the best,
Glenn B
