Not again.

New Jersey officials can pry into gunmaker Smith & Wesson’s internal company documents as part of a long-stalled state fraud probe, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.

The three-judge panel rejected a challenge from the gunmaker in a 2-1 ruling, with the dissenting judge questioning New Jersey’s “novel” efforts to take on the gun industry in court.

It’s over how S&W markets firearms.

Hey, I want to know how household cleaning product manufacturers market their cleaners? After all, they kill more children than anything else.

I hope we don’t see another good gun builder go down the toilet because no one will force states to follow the law.

Epoch Times.

ILION, N.Y.—In the village of Ilion, New York, 80 miles west of the state capital in Albany, residents are mourning the departure of gunmaker Remington Arms Co. after two centuries of continuous operation.

Without fanfare, the company announced last month that the manufacturing plant would be closing its doors on March 4, 2024.

“I feel like a family member has died,” Ilion Mayor John Stephens told The Epoch Times. “My dad raised four kids on a paycheck from there for 37 years. He walked to work and carried his lunch every day.”

Mr. Stephens said no one expected the announcement a week after Thanksgiving that the plant was set to close.

On Nov. 30, at 3:26 p.m., the company notified village officials of the decision by email. The message noted that “all separations” with the village would be completed by March 18, 2024.

Likewise, the company notified its 270 employees that they would soon be out of a job.

“They brought the second and third shifts in and said they were done,” Mr. Stephens said. “They notified the first shift in person. I found out through the media. The owner’s group didn’t even contact me.”

Mr. Stephens said the company made the announcement just five months into a newly ratified employee union contract.

“To say we were shocked [by the announcement] is probably an understatement,” the mayor told Ilion’s Village Board of Trustees at a public meeting on Dec. 11.

“In my opinion, it’s unfortunate and extremely unprofessional.”

Remington Arms didn’t return messages from The Epoch Times asking for comment.

Publicly, the company attributed the plant closure in part to a hostile political climate in Albany regarding firearms production.

“I am writing to inform you that RemArms LLC has decided to close its entire operation at 14 Hoefler Avenue, NY 13357,” Remington Arms said in a letter to employees. “The company expects that operations at the Ilion facility will conclude on or about March 4, 2024.”

The Georgia-based company said it would continue to make firearms at its facility in Huntsville, Alabama, which opened in 2014, a year after New York’s passage of the Safe Act, which created stricter gun laws.

The anti-gun political climate in Democrat-controlled Massachusetts prompted competitor Smith & Wesson to move from its longtime base in Springfield to Maryville, Tennessee. The company announced the opening of its new headquarters there in October.

In Ilion, the community reaction to the Remington plant closure has been a sense of loss and bewilderment, Mr. Stephens said.

Many are wondering what will become of the 10,000-square-foot plant and the village’s Remington identity.

Mr. Stephens said residents see the two as synonymous, interwoven by history, culture, and economics.

“Remington is Ilion—Ilion is Remington,” residents here like to say.

Eric Kennedy, who runs the Copper Cafe in the downtown village retail plaza, believes the ripple effect of the closure would impact the businesses that served Remington employees for years to come.

“I’m sure it will affect us. Any time you lose jobs, it affects the area’s economy. It definitely will hurt the economy—small town, big business in the village. It’s going to hurt a lot of families,” Mr. Kennedy told The Epoch Times.

“New York state is not friendly to hunters and sportsmen. That makes a big impact. I don’t blame [Remington] for moving out of state, [but] it’s going to hurt.”

I’m sure it will hurt and it’s all extremely sad, but there are some lessons. I’m not sure why anyone would be “bewildered” by this move.

Similar to the assembly line workers at Ford and GM who believed they should make enough money to be able to send kids to college, buy a house, buy two or three cars and a boat for the lake, there is no way on earth that the wage structure can support that sort of lifestyle for pistol and gun mechanics. It just can’t and that’s the hard truth. Wages must be set by the market or they won’t last.

In this case it’s surprising they lasted as long as they did. Where Remington moved is a right-to-work state. Where Remington left is an anti-gun, anti-business control freak show. Long ago it should have caused the Remington workers to pause and ponder that they were manufacturing firearms that they weren’t allowed to carry on their persons, or weren’t allowed to carry in their car or into the field. Long ago it should have dawned on them that they were funding with their union dues the very people who would kill their business.

To be sure, corporate missteps are always harmful, but pressing on every American worker is the fact that corporate interests are not their interests. Corporate officers will never put individual workers above the price of stock. Boards of Directors will always incentivize officers to maximize profits, ROE, EBIT and stock prices. That’s what they will do. In response, unions always seem to hurry the demise of corporations. Rather, individual workers must expand their capabilities, improve their standing, earn new credentials and increase their worth. This is the American way.

There is no such thing as a stagnant, reliable work location or job function. They disappear, and workers must be prepared. And if they had wanted to keep jobs as gun mechanics, Remington probably would have been happy to hire them in Alabama.

Source.

Liberal activists are preparing to file a lawsuit against the board of one of the largest gun manufacturers in the United States, alleging that the company exposed shareholders to unnecessary liability by selling and promoting AR-15 rifles and thus violating their fiduciary duty.

In a draft of a lawsuit viewed by Fox News Digital expected to be filed this week, liberal activist shareholder plantiffs alleged that the board of Smith & Wesson “knowingly allowed the Company to become exposed to significant liability for intentionally violating federal, state, and local laws through its manufacturing, marketing, and sales of AR-15 style rifles and similar semiautomatic firearms.”

The draft explains that the company’s board has expressed “unwillingness to exercise any oversight whatsoever” when it comes to manufacturing and marketing AR-15s, which the shareholders say has exposed the company to unnecessary liability.

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of moves made by liberal activists across the country using the legal system to go after gun manufacturers as a part of a larger movement known as environmental, social, and governance (ESG), which puts pressure on investors to be more “socially conscious.”

[ … ]

Two of the plaintiffs in the case are led by Sister Judy Byron, an anti-gun activist who recently participated in drafting a statement from the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, where “investors representing $634 billion in assets” called for pressure on gun manufacturers and companies associated with them “to review their operations, supply chains and policies and take meaningful action on this public safety concern.”

Sisten Judy Byron.  Part of a false and anti-Christian church, pushing a false agenda, destroying the hard work of good men, and ruining the lives of millions.

Here is Jared Yanis on the subject.

S&W will need to play rough in order to turn this threat out before it takes roots or they’ll end up another Remington.  Kill this movement in its infancy inside your group of shareholders.  Hire the best lawyers.  Buy them out.  Boot them out of meetings.  Boot them out of stock ownership if possible.  Amend the rules if needed.

Play rough.  They already are.

Source.

A gun factory in upstate New York with a history stretching back to the 19th century is scheduled to close in March, according to a letter from the company to union officials.

RemArms, the current version of Remington Arms, will close its facility in the Mohawk Valley village of Ilion around March 4, according to the letter sent Thursday. The letter said the company “did not arrive at this decision lightly,” according to the Observer-Dispatch of Utica.

Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, began making flintlock rifles in the region in 1816. The factory site in the village dates to 1828, with many of the current buildings constructed early in the 20th century.

More recently, the company faced temporary closures in Ilion, bankruptcy and legal pressure over the Sandy Hook school massacre. The current company no longer makes the Bushmaster AR-15 rifles used to kill 20 first-graders and six educators in the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut in 2012.

Investors doing business as the Roundhill Group purchased the Remington-branded gun-making business, including operations in Ilion and Lenoir City, Tennessee for $13 million. Owners announced plans in 2021 to move the company’s headquarters to Georgia.

Union officials called the news this week disappointing.

“The workers in Ilion enabled RemArms to rise from the ashes of the Remington Arms bankruptcy in 2020-21,” United Mine Workers of America International President Cecil E. Robert said in a prepared statement. “Without these workers and their dedication to producing the best firearms in the world, this company simply would not exist.”

I have a completely different take on things.  First, they had bad lawyers for the Sandy Hook lawsuit. Next, they ensconced in a gun control state and left only when it was too late. Third, they didn’t acknowledge and correct the errors and malfunctions of the Remington 700, even when they duplicated weapon discharge in their own labs without anything even being near the trigger. Fourth, they never got a handle on poor QA.

Fifth, and maybe the most significant error, they never left a union state to move to a right-to-work state. The union can blame it on others all they want to. When you extort employers rather than allow the market to set wages, this is the result.

Recoil.

Beretta Holding Group (owner of Beretta, Benelli, Burris, Steiner, and more) announced today their plans to invest $60 million in a state-of-the-art ammunition plant to be located in Savannah, Georgia!

After their recent acquisition of Norma Precision, the Beretta Holding Group now employs over 1,000 people in the USA through Beretta USA, Benelli USA, Burris, Steiner eOptics, and Norma Precision.

Dott. Pietro Gussalli Beretta, President and CEO of Beretta Holding S.A. said:

“I am delighted to announce our commitment to invest $60 million through our newly acquired US ammunition subsidiary, Norma Precision. Together with my Family and Beretta Holding, we are very proud to add ammunition manufacturing to our US presence. That is a very special moment as we can now provide our loyal and dedicated US customers with a full range of locally manufactured premium products spanning from firearms to ammunition and optics, all united under the same Group. We are also supporting the local economic network by creating hundreds of new jobs.”

You were aware that Beretta owned those companies weren’t you, including Benelli?  Now they own Norma Precision.

This is a nice addition to my series on Gun Valley Moves South.

Part I

Part II

Part III

David Codrea.

Licht’s Ronnie Barrett reference, of course, recalls a 2002 letter the President of Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, sent to then-Chief William J. Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department, about his company’s .50 caliber rifles:

“I will not sell, nor service, my rifles to those seeking to infringe upon the Constitution and the crystal clear rights it affords individuals to own firearms.”

Barrett again sent similar letters, one to the State of California in 2005, the Honolulu Police Department in 2008, and the State of New York in 2013.

I recounted these and more in my 2018 AmmoLand article, “More in the Firearms Industry Should Follow Hornady’s New York Example,” documenting President Steve Hornady’s announcement saying in part:

“Hornady will not knowingly allow our ammunition to be sold to the State of NY or any NY agencies. Their actions are a blatant and disgusting abuse of office and we won’t be associated with a government that acts like that. They should be ashamed.”

Yes they could stop the disarmers, and yes they should be ashamed.  But they’re not – they are only interested in the revenue.  I’ve pointed out that Cloud Defensive has taken such a stand, and it cost them money to do it.

But here’s the question.  We can point to Barrett, Cloud Defensive, Hornady, and a few others, perhaps, but what pistols and rifles do the disarmers shoot?

Until Smith & Wesson, Glock, and a host of other large manufacturers can be persuaded to join the club of those who truly respect the 2A, this effort won’t go anywhere.  It will be symbolic, and not much else.

I think it would be a good thing to do if someone took it on to mail each and every CEO of the manufacturers, but this is too much time for me to spend.  If some enterprising reader wants to start a thread on this, I’ll find a way to host it.

News from the TPRC.

Taking cues from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday announced they would introduce legislation allowing private citizens, local governments and the state to sue reckless gun manufacturers.

The proposal is similar to a controversial measure passed by Texas lawmakers last year that allows private citizens to sue those who get abortions or assist others in getting abortions.

After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Texas law, Newsom vowed to work with the California Legislature on a bill that would allow private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in California

Lawmakers said they have been working on the bill since the summer, and it’s modeled on law passed in New York state in July. The New York statute says industry stakeholders can be held liable for the illegal or “unreasonable” sale, manufacture, distribution, importing or marketing of firearms that cause harm to the public as a “public nuisance.”

I’m sure there will be the usual group of Californians who tell me that California still has some good folks, that we just to come alongside then and help them fight.  That may or may not be true – at some point patriots need to cut their losses.

While I’m sure my readers from California won’t like it, there’s a sure-fire way to stop this in its tracks and put an end to this silliness.

Stop selling everything to anyone.  No firearms, no ammunition, no replacement part, no cleaning kits, nothing.  To anyone.  Californians are on this list, to include law enforcement of any kind (local, county, state, or FedGov), and military.  This last part would shut down the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, Camp Pendleton, and 29 Palms.

Shut down everything.  No one gets anything if this bill passes.  No guns, no shotgun shells, no bullets, cartridges or powder.  All manufacturers, distributors and FFLs have no choice but to go out of business.  LEOs would be left with batons.

Of course, for this to be effective, all manufacturers would have to do this in unison, and that won’t happen.  The [temporary] saving grace for patriots in California is that manufacturers love money more than they love their product or their clientele.  So Californians will get their stuff, right up until California juries begin awarding $20 million lawsuits against firearms and ammunition manufacturers and they end up going out of business.

Then we all lose.

The extent of this isn’t clear to me from the article.

Remington Firearms, the country’s oldest gun manufacturer, will be moving its headquarters from Ilion, New York, to Georgia, the company announced Monday.

As part of the deal, the company said it would invest $100 million in the operation and hire 856 people over a five-year period in Troup County.

It was not immediately clear what effect the transfer would have on Remington’s operations in New York and Tennessee. The company owns the parts of the former Remington Outdoor Co. which makes rifles, shotguns, and some handguns after the former parent auctioned its assets in pieces last year during a bankruptcy proceeding in Alabama.

Investors doing business as the Roundhill Group purchased the Remington-branded gun-making business, including operations in Ilion, New York, and Lenoir City, Tennessee, for $13 million.

[ … ]

Phil Smith, a spokesperson for the United Mine Workers of America, which represents some workers at a factory in Ilion, said the union had no information about whether workers in New York would be affected. The new owners recently restarted operations there, calling back more than 200 workers who had been laid off. The local government in New York offered 10 years of tax breaks in exchange for the restart and upgrades.

Well, at this point, you can color me confused.  I don’t know what parts are left after the sale, what is moving, and what they will be manufacturing.

This move is far too late, but I hope they can make a go of it and get back to good guns after Cerberus financially engineered the life out of them.

And if they want to make good stuff without the hassle of a union, getting to a right to work state is the best idea.  Keep the union out.

News from Springfield, with some running commentary.

SPRINGFIELD — Smith & Wesson president and CEO Mark Smith says the company doesn’t want to make an enemy of the state of Massachusetts.

But he feels at least some lawmakers have made an enemy of Smith & Wesson with legislation that would ban the manufacture in Massachusetts of firearms that are unlawful to sell here.

The legislation is a response to mass shootings involving semiautomatic rifles made by Smith & Wesson and other companies. Advocates say high-capacity magazines and high rates of fire make the guns too dangerous for civilian hands.

Whether you have enemies is sometimes not up to you.

“We are under attack by the state of Massachusetts,” Smith said Friday.

CEO for two years and operations director for a decade before that, Smith gave a tour of the bustling, half-million-square-foot factory a day after announcing the company would move its headquarters and 550 jobs in production and management to gun-friendly Maryville, Tennessee. It’s not a move the company wanted to make, he said.

It will cost $125 milli million “that I didn’t want to spend,” Smith said.

Riding a wave of brisk gun sales, mostly to first time-buyers, Smith & Wesson said revenue hit $1.1 billion in the most recent fiscal year, up from $529.6 million a year earlier.

“Why would I disrupt that?” he said.

Smith & Wesson said it is relocating a total of 750 jobs to Tennessee from Springfield and its other sites. The company is also closing a plastics factory in Connecticut and a Missouri distribution center it opened in 2019.

Construction in Maryville is expected to begin later in 2021 and be substantially complete by the summer of 2023. No employees will move for two years.

A substantial operation will stay in Springfield, including the forge, machine shop and revolver assembly. There will still be 1,000 jobs here, many of them highly skilled and high-paying, the company said.

I understand the felt need to keep highly skilled revolver mechanics on staff rather than lose them due to a forced move, but this may not be up to S&W.  More on that later.

In just more than three years when the transition is complete, Smith & Wesson’s revolvers will still be manufactured here and stamped “Springfield, Massachusetts.” But the company’s semiautomatic rifles — the industry calls them modern sporting rifles while opponents say assault rifles — and semiautomatic pistols will be made in Tennessee.

News reports from Tennessee said Smith & Wesson may buy the land for only $1. It is part of a larger incentive package that includes seven-year tax abatement that could result in about $8 million in company savings, according to sources The Daily Times granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the deal.

That’s corporate welfare, and in I’m opposed to it.  The move should have been made a very long time ago, and the market should dictate where they move, not incentives.

Smith & Wesson said its move was prompted by legislation proposed earlier this year by Springfield state Rep. Bud L. Williams and others that would outlaw part of its manufacturing business. That includes feeding devices capable of containing 10 or more rounds, trigger pulls requiring pressure less than 10 pounds, threaded barrels that accept silencers and other military-looking hardware.

“They are moving their headquarters. That’s what corporate does. We are trying to save lives,” Williams said this week.

John Rosenthal, a co-founder of Stop Handgun Violence, which backs the bill, said Thursday’s announcement came the same day as the fourth-anniversary of the Las Vegas shooting where a gunman fired on a concert crowd. Fifty-eight people were killed that night, and two others died later. More than 850 were injured.

If that’s what really happened in Las Vegas, then release and honest and true report explaining how the room was spotless after thousands of rounds had been discharged in that room, rather than covered in soot, carbon and powder residue.

Smith said Friday that it was the proposed law that prompted the move. The products the legislation singles out are what consumers want, and they make up 60% percent of Smith & Wesson’s sales, he said. Limiting those products for sale to the military or law enforcement isn’t feasible because Smith & Wesson’s share of those markets is too small.

Be sure to understand that it’s not just the AR-15 suite of products that the communists don’t like in our hands, it’s the M&P pistols too.

Smith — no relation to the company co-founder — said it doesn’t matter that the proposal is just a bill, one of dozens filed each year that often don’t get a hearing, much less a vote on Beacon Hill.

“Honestly, we know we could have defeated it this session,” Smith said. “But it will be back the next session and the session after that.”

It will take years to move the operation, he said. So if the company waited for the bill to pass, it’d be too late.

“I just can’t operate with that big a risk hanging over the company,” he said. “We only started this process once the bill was filed. Then and only then.”

Once Smith and his executives decided they had to move, they found it made sense to close the Missouri and Connecticut plants as well and consolidate some operations in Tennessee.

The plastic parts from Deep River, Connecticut, go into the rifles and pistols, so that needs to be near the assembly lines. The distribution system needed to move from Missouri.

“But it was the need to move from this law that triggered all the other discussions,” Smith said. “We didn’t want to do this.”

The forges, giant steel hammers that shape aluminum or carbon steel, pounding parts out of metal blocks, are hard to move. So are hundreds of computer numerical control milling machines used to shape the metal. That’s why they’ll stay in Springfield.

Revolvers don’t have attributes targeted by the proposed law, so work assembling them will also stay here. It’s painstaking work that takes a great deal of training and experience. Assemblers dry-fire the weapons and adjust them based on the sound of the metallic click until they get it just right. It’s why the jobs that are staying are so highly paid.

You should move everything, excepting nothing at all, not even the heavy equipment.  Oh, and rather than “Revolvers don’t have attributes targeted by the proposed law,” you should have said “Revolvers don’t have attributes targeted by the proposed law at the moment.”  Try, try to understand.  It isn’t just semi-automatics they communists don’t like.  It’s any firearm in the hands of anyone but a state actor.  Semiautomatics are just in line first.  They’ll eventually have the bolt action deer hunting rights locked up tight at a state armory to be checked out only by state-approved hunters for the duration of the hunt.  Anything else that fires a projectile will be anathema in the hands of anyone who isn’t functioning on behalf of the state.

“If I was doing this to save a dime, why would I leave the highest-paid jobs behind?” Smith said. “We love Springfield. We love Mayor (Domenic J.) Sarno. We didn’t want to leave.”

You shouldn’t love him.  He hates you and wants to see you out of business.  And you shouldn’t want to stay in a place like that.

Some workers whose jobs are not moving have asked to relocate anyway. That’ll open up a Springfield position for someone on the relocation list who wants to stay.

“We want to take as many of our workers with us as we can,” he said.

Good.  You should take all of them, and if some don’t want to leave and they happen to be revolver mechanics, then make them understand that they won’t have a job in two years and in the mean time it’s their responsibility to train other revolver mechanics.

“The message is to highlight the area,” he said. “We are going to be talking about what it’s like to raise your family here. We are going to talk about residential prospects, what housing is like.”

Muir said the region sells itself as an outdoor recreation hub close to Knoxville, with the University of Tennessee, and to Nashville.

“Our pitch, at least in Blount County, is that we are the peaceful side of the Smokies,” he said. “Get a cabin and enjoy the mountains peacefully. It’s just a way to get away and relax in a calm area.”

Get out of communist areas like Massachusetts, and towards more liberty.  You won’t regret it.

ZeroHedge.

Less than six months after gunmaker Kimber Mfg. moved from New York to Alabama due in part to ‘gun and business-friendly support’ from the red state, Smith & Wesson is moving out of Massachusetts – and will relocate its headquarters to Maryville, Tennessee in 2023, according to Bloomberg.

The nation’s largest gun manufacturer cited restrictive legislation currently under consideration in Mass., which if enacted, would prohibit the company from manufacturing certain guns in the state they’ve called home for nearly 170 years.

“These bills would prevent Smith & Wesson from manufacturing firearms that are legal in almost every state in America and that are safely used by tens of millions of law-abiding citizens every day exercising their Constitutional 2nd Amendment rights, protecting themselves and their families, and enjoying the shooting sports,” said SWBI CEO Mark Smith.

“While we are hopeful that this arbitrary and damaging legislation will be defeated in this session, these products made up over 60% of our revenue last year, and the unfortunate likelihood that such restrictions would be raised again led to a review of the best path forward for Smith & Wesson,” he added.

The move will bring 750 jobs to Maryville, along with a $125 million investment, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing the Tennessee Department of Economic & Community Development.

Lower cost of living was also a factor in the move, according to Smith.

Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno said in a statement that the move will cost the city 550 job, which he described as ‘devastating’ for the families involved. The city said they would attempt to work with the gunmaker to try and retain 1,000 remaining jobs.

According to a person familiar with the move, the company will keep some production in Springfield.

The good.  S&W is moving.  What took you so long?  You should have made this move a long time ago to grab a part of Gun Valley Moves South (and here is Part II).

The bad.  You should have made this move a long time ago.  You waited too long, just at the time when housing prices are at a peak.

The ugly.  You’re leaving some manufacturing in Massachusetts.  This is a bad move, and you’ll live to regret it, from unionization from one plant to another, to further restrictions on firearms manufacturing.  What – you don’t really think this is the last, do you?  It’s better to get it all done at one time.