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As I've mentioned before, gunmaking is a difficult business and subject to the same world economic pressures that other manufacturing industries are. "Shooters driving down prices" is a simplistic and very unsophisticated view of the issues involved, but it is a view that is very tempting to take, as if we shooters should just take a look at the price on a gun on the dealer's counter and happily offer a 10% tip to buy it, this tip being the salvation of the gun industry. I'm not picking on anyone's specific view, as I have heard this general line of reasoning before, i.e. it's the buyer's "fault".

Truth is, the troubles facing commercial gunmakers are far more challenging. Some realities of the gunmaking industry that plague all makers:

1) Service life of the product is indefinite. They last for generations and simply put, do not NEED to be replaced.

2) Gunmaking technology is quite basic and is possessed by many nations, nations whose labor costs are mere fractions of those of the developed nations. The potential to set up gun production {or optics which as a related field suffers similarly} in developing nations is there, and will continue in the future.

3) Related to 1) above, many local markets are saturated and gunmakers must attempt to sell their products to owners who already own very similar products, products, remember, that will not wear out in the lifetime of the original owner, products that can be handed down to three or four generations of shooters and serve each one quite admirably. Saturated markets led to Winchester's design and production of ballistically-speaking, ridiculously redundant calibers.

4) Winchester {as an example} attempted to inject an element of sort-of "planned obsolescence" {a very effective auto-making scheme} into the market with its intro of those above-mentioned calibers. One trip to the range or out to the field and even the most ignorant rube was convinced otherwise. {NOT saying these are "bad" calibers, but Win advertising aside, merely redundant}.

5) Competition between gun makers is intense and must continue to be. It has been said that the Gun Control Act of 1968 was supported vociferously by the major American gun companies in an attempt to eliminate competition from foreign dumping of milsurp long arms and handguns into the US market. I suspect this was indeed true. On a related theme, it has also been rumored that gun companies have lobbied for the destruction of many American service weapons and the prevention of their sale on the commercial market. This also makes good "sense". Why WOULD a maker of .45 pistols want the market flooded with cheap, high quality pistols? Such dumping is seen in gunmaking circles as unfair government intrusion into their industry. Looking at it another way, if you made jeeps, would you want Uncle selling a similar product for 1/10 the cost of yours?

6) It is a pathetic reality that certain forms of gun control remain the last bastion for spurring gun sales in many nations. Yes, gun control in various forms is at times the gunmaker's best short-term friend. Witness the growth of the .40 and .45 pistol market in the USA after magazine limitations choked the advantage of the 9x19. All the way back to Austro-Hungarian GC which prescribed size limits on pistols resulting in certain modifications to FN pistols exported to A-H. And in Sweden, the limitation on number of rifles that may be owned spurs sales of newer guns to replace them {and we in the USA see some of these fine old guns being imported here and sold at nominal cost}. In the USA we see the same historical reality: Look at all the weird guns {pump-action "AK's", single stack mag AK's, etc that were developed during the AWB years of the '90's, guns that never would have seen the light of day had not the AWB forced their existence. And each time there is a new GC scare, hordes of gun aficionados flock to the stores to Buy-Before-They-Die.

There is so much more to this saga but my coffee is running out. Suffice it to say that gun collectors/hunters/shooters tend to see their hobby as somehow above the general run of economic reality. It is not.

So, what will happen to Remington? Who knows. I suspect they will be reorganized by some group or conglomerate on a smaller scale, selling several new products of sufficiently {it is hoped...}different design to "justify" their existence. When this occurs they will be faced with the same challenges they were faced with before the sale of the company took place. Golf clubs and typewriters anyone?

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