They Forget Our People

Woe to anyone considering working with the Obama Administration. One of our favorite pastimes as gun owners is, as a fellow blogger mentioned once to me, “knifing traitors.” To all the big firearms manufacturers and retails out there: remember Smith & Wesson. Remember Ruger struggling for a long time for cooperating. Remember killing several industry groups who turned. Remember countless other turncoats we’ve destroyed too. It could be you. Cooperation will be punished. You can count on it.

Hat tip to Instapundit, who comments, “Which is funny, because it’s the gun-control fanatics who are always accusing the NRA of being a stooge for the gun industry.” Yeah, funny it’s always the gun industry we have to be worried about getting soft, cutting deals, and throwing us under the bus. Maybe one day they’ll realize the gun industry and the NRA are manifestations of us, rather than the other way around. This is popular sovereignty at its finest.

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23 thoughts on “They Forget Our People”

  1. I mean, it’s not like a big sporting goods retailer decided to live up to their name and stop selling AR’s, screwing over customer and supplier alike.

    Or it’s not as if a major online retailer decided to have ethical standards that were Cheaper Than Dirt! and drop online gun sales.

    We have met the enemy, and they is us!

  3. The .gov promised relief from lawsuits and preferential treatment in contracts for signing the HUD agreement.

    Not a year and a half later, Tompkins PLC let S&W go for an almost $100 million loss over its purchase price.

    I’d hope anybody contemplating this is aware of those numbers…

  4. I don’t know; when we have a real scalp, a major company driven out of business and liquidated, we can say this with confidence. Right now I think our saving grace is that everyone is making an AR-15 pattern rifle or the like (i.e. “assault weapons” are mainstream), and enough manufacturers have been spanked.

    Retailers are a “to be determined”, although if CTD really suffers in the short term we’ll be in a better posture. Hope the politics don’t move too quickly; it’s good to hear the Republican Senate Minority Leader say we’ve got more important things on our plate.

    1. It’s one thing to go after S&W, because guns are their primary business; with Wal-Mart and Dick’s, however, selling guns is only a very small fraction of their business. It doesn’t hurt to try, though…

  5. How many of our gun makers have union workforces?

    I know Colt is UAW. Who else?

    Back room deals where the labor issues go away if you play ball is Chicagoan.

    1. Hmmm, yeah. Wikipedia tells us they went on strike in 1985 for 5 years, which “was one of the longest running labor strikes in American history.” They lost the M16 contract to FNH in 1988….

      My main point here is not to bash unions per se but to point out that adversarial Wagner Act style unionism is frequently incompatible with corporate survival, unless propped up by the government. So I wouldn’t expect too much of their competition to be unionized, simply because so much of it is alive and healthy (well, Obama has helped…), the latter which cannot be said for today’s Colt, outside of their defense stuff. And they’re in the process of losing an $89.9 million contract for M4’s to Remington.

      Don’t they sell a fair number of AR-15s to civilians? Wikipedia again, in the context of a brutal loss in the courtroom, says Bushmaster sells more to the civilian market (Colt claimed a trademark on “M4”).

      For more, evidently look at their SEC 10-Ks … well, for all 3 publicly traded companies. A 2010 discussion I found said S&W wasn’t unionized based on their 10-K. Also said Beretta avoided getting unionized in the late ’80s. No reports of any other company being unionized.

      From other readings, there were claims a number of famous brands went non-union in one way or another due to “labor trouble”. Winchester (now owned by FNH), maybe S&W.

    2. What labor issues? The proposals being floated on all civvie semi-autos (note handguns are on the table in some plans): bans, confiscation, no transfer, move to NFA, whatever, means plants close. No jobs to have labor issues with.

      1. “No jobs to have labor issues with.”

        The SEIU will have no troubles with this … the private sector industrial unions, we’ll see. Of course, if only Colt is unionized and it doesn’t sell that much to civilians anymore, this won’t be a strongly positive factor. Yeah, they won’t necessarily be left with much more than civilian sales if the lose the M4 contract, but that will take a while and they probably can’t compete on price … well, once prices get sane again, which could take a long while.

  6. You know, everyone keeps saying “remember Smith & Wesson”, but I don’t. I appreciate your efforts, but some of us aren’t aware of every nuance of gun politics in the US. I think one of the errors you make is assuming too much of your readers. I’m going to google this Smith & Wesson thing, but I don’t think everyone who doesn’t know about it will. So that lesson is lost on them.

    Anyway, keep up the good work.

    1. Sorry, I forget there are some people who were young when that deal was cut, or not yet people of the gun. Basically, under Smith and Wesson’s old owners, they inked a deal with the Clinton Administration to stop selling politically correct guns. If I recall, the deal even went so far as to suggest dealers who sold politically incorrect guns could not sell Smith & Wesson products. This was in exchange for the Clinton Administration dropping their suit against Smith & Wesson, over crime in public housing (a suit now impossible because we changed federal law to preempt such suits).

      Gun owners organized a boycott of the company, and their British owners sold them at a massive loss. It took years for Smith to recover from that. It almost destroyed an American Icon. Fortunately, their subsequent owners have had more brains than their previous owners.

        2. I note the Wiki article noting gun owners re-embraced the company once they renounced the deal. It was really like being faced with having to kill one of your own kids in self-defense. Smith is iconic to the American gun culture. And we did that. We were willing to kill it. Any other lesser company needs to think about that long and hard.

        3. I’m an Aussie. I was told off by multiple members on TFL for purchasing a new S&W – in Australia. The pressure on gun forums to comply with the boycott was intense, with the internal lock being referred to as the “Hillary Hole”, S&W became $&W, threads about S&W products were constantly derailed by boycott demands for months.

          FWIW I had to turn in that S&W three years later. Registration does indeed lead to confiscation.

          1. Were there any resisters to the confiscation? I just can’t imagine millions of people complying with that here.

            1. According to an expert cited in a recent Reason article, compliance with the 1996 ban was around 20%:

              And even that underwhelming estimate gives the authorities the benefit of the doubt. Three years after Australia’s controversial ban was implemented, when 643,000 weapons had been surrendered, Inspector John McCoomb, the head of the state of Queensland’s Weapons Licensing Branch, told The Sunday Mail, “About 800,000 (semi-automatic and automatic) SKK and SKS weapons came in from China back in the 1980s as part of a trade deal between the Australian and Chinese governments. And it was estimated that there were 1.2 million semi-automatic Ruger 10/22s in the country. That’s about 2 million firearms of just two types in the country.”

              Do the math. Two million illegal firearms of just two types, and only 643,000 guns of all types were surrendered …

              The Australian Shooters Journal did its own math in a 1997 article on the “gun buyback.” Researchers for the publication pointed out that the Australian government’s own low-ball, pre-ban estimate of the number of prohibited weapons in the country yielded a compliance rate of 19 percent.

              But maybe success is in the eye of the beholder. After the expected mountains of surrendered weapons failed to manifest themselves, then-Australian Attorney General Darryl Williams’s office revised its estimate of total firearms in the country to a number lower than its pre-ban estimate of prohibited firearms, and declared victory.

              Inspector McCoomb, like the Australian Shooters Journal, concluded the ban “has failed.”

              I get the impression that post-WWII massive resistance to confiscations and registrations is universal. Especially in countries that were occupied during it, but the horrors of that war and the totalitarian regimes that in the last century killed a minimum 100 million of their own people (my guess is more like 250 million) would appear to have had the expected results in people’s attitudes, even in or perhaps especially in Germany.

            2. Not to the handgun confiscation as all licensed handguns were registered – there was always a paper trail to the current owner.
              The many unregistered pre-1900 antiques and the thousands of ‘deactivated’ and parts guns? I’ve no evidence either way.
              Prior to the 1996 long arms seizure, most states did not have registration of long arms and the compliance rate was very low. Enough SKKs & SKSs remain out there that the Feds felt it necessary to ban importation of surplus 7.62×39 a few years later.
              The fact remains that firearms ownership for self defense became verboten. The gun culture of self reliance was driven underground and made extremist in the eyes of the MSM drip fed public, leaving fuddery as the only acceptable version.

              https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=fGaDAThOHhA covers it well.

              1. Just to add to the above, I was told, but not had it confirmed, that each item handed in at the ’96 seizure was counted as a firearm.
                So a friend who handed in a broken semi-auto .22 with seven mags supposedly handed in 8 firearms, although in reality he handed in none, just some scrap metal.

    1. I haven’t looked into it, but probably some piece of legislation introduced by a state legislator that won’t go anywhere.

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