MORAN, Texas (AP) - This tiny West Texas town is fading. The Methodist church is for sale, the American Legion post is on the brink of closing and half the main drag is shuttered.
The Houston Chronicle reports homes are falling in on themselves. The only restaurant, most days, closes at 2 p.m.
But the city of Moran[1] also is loved. Every morning, residents gather at that one restaurant, Pizza Mark, for coffee and gossip. The mayor, unpaid, fixes the gravel roads on his own tractor. Many grew up on this harsh yet beautiful land and do not plan to leave it.
Moran[2] is a town of “yessir” and “yes ma’am”, of handshakes and hollers. It’s a place where people know each other by the sound of an engine or color of a truck. And like anywhere else in rural Texas, few would know it existed - if not for the fact that it’s home to the inventor of the bump stock.
And that’s not something many people here want to talk about.
Jeremiah Benjamin Cottle[3], known as Ben[4], grew up just outside this town of 250 people or so, 160 miles west of Dallas. His grandparents, Julie[5] and Buster[6], raised him and tended to what remained of the city, mowing empty lots and planting flowers. Here, he dreamed up a device that made semi-automatic weapons shoot like machine guns, a device that made him rich and put Moran[7] on the map.
His company, Slide Fire, transformed from a home-grown operation in a shed on his family’s ranch to a multi-million dollar enterprise in a hulking beige warehouse surrounded by high fences and razor wire. Cottle[8] patented his invention, and the business became the nation’s top supplier of bump stocks, which sold for several hundred dollars apiece.
Then, on October 1, 2017, a man in a room at a high-rise hotel in Las Vegas[9] opened fire on the crowd at a music festival below. He killed 58 people in 10 minutes. Twelve of his guns were outfitted with bump stocks, according to news reports, allowing him to rain a deadly stream of bullets onto helpless concertgoers below.
Each mass shooting in America - which now includes a high school in Santa Fe - sparks tortured debate about how to prevent them from happening again, and that debate invariably includes placing restrictions on the rights of citizens to own the weapons they want....
But so far, the only real restriction that has met acceptance across the political divide is a proposed ban on bump stocks, currently in a Department of Justice public comment period. The brunt of that proposal is being borne by the little town of Moran[10], where residents commonly believe blame should fall not on the weapon used in a