. . .

Remington will go upside down relatively soon. Colt is still trying to recover from Bankruptcy. But the underlying issue is fairly simple: all technical innovation in firearms has been coming (as expected) from belgian, german, and austrian engineers. The most popular weapon in the states is effectively open sourced (the AR15) – so much so that like gaming computers and harley davidson’s it’s a kit-gun open for constant customization. The AR15/M4 is actually a poor quality platform – it’s just cheap, light, and reasonably accurate. While the plastic gun craze of the 80s-00’s resulted in a ridiculous number of failed designs, we seem to be exiting that period. And aside from Smith and Wesson, it doesn’t appear that american companies can come close to the production quality of FN/Steyr/HK/Glock. And given that there are no patents on some of the most popular guns (CZ/1911), and that nearly anyone can buy CAD/CAM systems with barrels being the only particularly challenging bit of technology, it’s just …. well, not a good market for americans. I see it as a continuation of the american design ethic, business ethic. We are sort of like the brits now. We can only make labor intensive products with heavy adult supervision.