MORAN, Texas _ In this tiny West Texas town last week, Jeremiah Cottle was trying to take comfort in the support he has gotten from neighbors.
But elsewhere, there was little comfort. Cottle and the company he owns, Slide Fire Solutions, have come under heavy criticism for selling a rifle attachment that few outside of gun enthusiast circles had ever heard of before last week.
But since a gunman killed 58 people attending a country music concert earlier this month in Las Vegas, a flood of attention has turned to Cottle's little-known device, called a "bump stock" or "bump fire stock," which may have enabled Stephen Paddock to turn semiautomatic, one-shot-per-trigger-pull rifles into ones able to fire much like machine guns.
Online commenters have called his invention "irresponsible" and said he has blood on his hands. Retailers have rushed to pull the items from shelves and websites. Members of Congress have called for the bump stock to be banned. And in a surprise announcement, even the National Rifle Association said it would not oppose regulation of the device.
Unshaven and red-eyed, Cottle, 40, declined to talk about the shooting or the blowback against the company he founded in 2010.
All of the attention clearly has taken him by surprise.
"I'm a hunting and fishing kind of person," he said, standing in front of his business that is housed in a corrugated metal building at the end of a gravel driveway.
At the last census, Moran had a population of 270. Since the tragedy, the tight-knit community has rallied around Cottle.
He said he was heartened by his neighbors' response, adding that "we've lived here since the 1880s."
"We've always been about community. Everybody is," Cottle said. "That's the way we live out here."
If his business had to close, Cottle said, "it would hurt the whole town, the school. We pay a very large amount of property taxes.
"I'm one of the largest businesses in Shackelford County."
And one of the largest employers. At one time, Slide Fire Solutions employed 27 people, the equivalent of a tenth of the town's population.
