THAT’s why they looked at Freedom Group! – ATK buys Savage

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ATK (formerly Alliant Techsystems), the ammo-making giant that Honeywell spun off some two dozen years ago, just acquired the holding company of Savage from a Minnesota venture capital firm. ATK is paying $315M cash, using cash it has on hand and an existing rolling credit facility; that’s about 5.5 times annual earnings, and ATK says it plans to be net positive on ATK earnings per share in the first year.

We should have seen this coming for several reasons:

ATK, like seller Norwest Equity Partners, is originally a Minnesota firm, and its Sporting Group is still headquartered there (Anoka), even though it’s had to relocate corporate HQ to the shadow of the flagpole due to its dependency on government contracts;
Everyone dependent on military contracts is looking to diversify, and Savage and its fellow brands (Savage Range Systems and Stevens) have almost zero military contract exposure;
and perhaps most importantly, the current CEO of Savage is a former ATK VP. He only joined in January, when the CEO who led Savage from near-bankruptcy in 2008 to success today retired.
This also explains what ATK was doing when they requested the packet on Freedom Group — we thought they were looking at Remington’s ammo-production costs, but now it seems more likely that they were pricing the Savage buy, and ratholing Freedom’s financials for future reference.

ARLINGTON, Va., May 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — ATK (NYSE: ATK) announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Caliber Company, the parent company of Savage Sports Corporation. Savage is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of hunting rifles and shotguns, delivering innovative products for more than 100 years. The acquisition would expand ATK’s portfolio offering by adding long guns to its leading brands in commercial and security ammunition, shooting sports and security-related accessories. The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. ATK anticipates closing the transaction in the first quarter of its Fiscal Year 2014 (FY14), which ends June 30, 2013.

via ATK to Acquire Caliber Company, Parent Company of Savage Sports Corporation – May 13, 2013. Read the whole press release.

Savage has had a history nearly as long and a rocky as Remington, with fewer legendary weapons, and fewer bankruptcies and receiverships, but it’s not completely without either. It has made everything from pocket pistols to shotguns, produced automatic weapons (including vast quantities of Lewis Guns) under license in the 20th Century, and even produced a .45 caliber competitor to the Colt that became the 1911, but its main product lines today are center- and rim-fire bolt action rifles.

Not a flipped negative -- this .338 Lapua LE sniper rifle comes in Lefty, too.

Not a flipped negative — this .338 Lapua Model 110 BA Law Enforcement sniper rifle comes in Lefty, too.

The primary Savage rifles are the Model 10, 11 and 12 bolt-action center-fire rifles, and single-shot and repeating bolt-action rifles. There’s also a bolt-action shotgun, for Eastern deer and turkey hunters. A semi-auto rimfire, the Model 64, is still in production in various finishes, but the firm offers no semi-auto centerfire or Modern Sporting Rifle.

Savage guns are known for accuracy and value. An awful lot of police departments compared the Savage .338 magnum precision rifle to the much more expensive Steyr, and wound up buying the Savage and years’ worth of ammo.

Many models are also available in left hand actions, making them a good choice for that 10% for whom standard bolts are on the wrong side of the gun.

Scott Lipsett took this photo of the Model 11 Lightweight’s fluted bolt. The barrel’s free-floated in standard modern Savage practice.

The most recent Savage product introduction was a lightweight version of the Model 11, available in 9 popular calibers from .223 to .30-06, notably including two long-range specials, the 6.5 Creedmore and 6.5 x 284 Norma. The .223 version’s only 5.5 pounds before you scope it, so it’s a varmint buster that you can walk all day with, without building your biceps at all.

The well-remembered Model 99 lever-action rifle, with its Savage-specific chamberings .300 and .303 Savage, was for decades the Eastern whitetail hunter’s Winchester 94 alternative, but it is long out of production. (The last was made in 1998). However, it was this gun that led to Savage’s now-politically-incorrect Indian Head logo:

Chief Lame Deer. One good Savage deserves another! (We are so going to PC hell for that).

In 1919, Chief Lame Deer approached Arthur [Savage] to purchase lever-action rifles for the Indian reservation and the two men struck a deal. The tribe would get discounted rifles and Savage would get their support and endorsement. It was at this time in the company’s history, that Arthur Savage added the Indian head logo–a direct gift from the Chief–to the company name. By 1919, Savage Arms was manufacturing high power rifles, 22 caliber rifles, pistols and ammunition.

There are a few, very rare, Model 99 military muskets out there. Some early (Model 95) units were made for the New York National Guard , but the contract was cancelled, and the New York guardsmen went to the Spanish-American War to face Spain’s excellent Mausers with black-powder trapdoor Springfields instead. And others were made for the Montreal Home Guard, a citizen’s militia of Anglo men of substance of the WWI era. In addition to these rare rifles, Savage and Stevens shotguns were also used by the US military, notably in WWII as training shotguns for aerial gunners (as were similar Remington shotguns; all of these weapons used the Browning long-recoil system and resembled the Browning A5).

The Model 99 is the “other” lever action. It was much stronger than a Winchester 94, and was even chambered in .308 later in its run.

Stevens guns appear to be, essentially, downmarket Savages. The make is today nearly moribund.

One of the most interesting product lines acquired in the purchase is Savage Range Systems. You may have seen or used the “snail trap” or a “wet snail trap” range, you’ve used their product. (The indoor range we’re members of, in Manchester, NH, has such a trap, as does one of our favoriet “away” ranges, Silver Eagle Group in Virginia). They’ve made an environmentally safe and friendly trap that safely decelerates up to .50 BMG with no lead spatter, and makes recovering the lead child’s play. They even have completely diffetent technology retrofits for old ranges that don’t have room for a snail trap, using innovative rubber media. We can’t remember, but think AWG’s cool mobile range used a SRS trap. They also make a decent shoot house that’s miles above our tire houses from Blue Light/SOT days. (One thing about being retired is you totally envy the guys who are doing your old job today, as they have cooler toys. But sometimes they envy us, because in our day, we had more freedom when we were away from the flagpole. You can’t really micromanage an SFODA by daily 120-group Blind Transmission Burst, although we did have a few leaders who tried).

Savage Range Systems is the one element of the new buy that is, like most of ATK’s other business, highly exposed to government budgetary mismanagement. Indeed, ATK is suffering a little right now, due to the sequester and due to NASA’s budget cuts and reorientation away from space and towards domestic and foreign policy — ATK is a big producer of rocket stuff.

ATK is best known as the primary small-arms-ammunition producer to the DOD, but it is a remarkably wide-ranging conglomerate that does everything from put the mission suites in the (probably stillborn) MC-27 special operations aircraft, to put 1st-shot cold bore handspan precision in artillery rounds, to making a 5.56mm tracer round that sort of works. In addition to, and largely as a spinoff of, its military-ammunition dominance, the company already had a portfolio of sport-shooting and personal-defense firms. It was, however, lacking a firearms manufacturer. ATK’s Sporting Group now has remarkable vertical integration in the sporting arms market, as its brands include:

Ammo: Blazer, CCI, Estate Cartridge, Federal Premium, Fusion, Speer..
Guns: Savage, Stevens.
Other: Alliant Power, Blackhawk!, Champion (targets), Gunslick, Outers, RCBS, Savage Range Systems, Weaver.

So now they can put the gun in your hand; the scope and rings on, and bullets, in the gun; the case to carry it to the range to sight it in; the range itself; the targets to observe and adjust your group; and the sling to carry it on the big hunt. Then, they’ll sell you the rig to reload the casings you’ve expended so far. They’ll make money selling you the razor and the blades.

And the Savage Group, part of ATK’s purchase, also includes BowTech Archery, so you can do it all over again during next bow season.

The workers in Westfield are anxious, but Massachusetts’s anti-gun politicians, unlike their peers just west in Albany, or just downriver in Connecticut, have directed their vilification more at the legal users than the makers of sporting arms, so there’s less reason to bail than for NY or CT based firms. Also, ATK has a history of leaving alone those profitable subsidiaries with established, skilled workforces. Savage Range Systems will benefit from ATK’s reach in Washington and contract savvy, but the big winner is ATK, which has been jonesing for a long-gun maker for quite some time. And perhaps that lobbying and contract savvy will mean Remington finally gets some competition the US sniper rifle contracts it’s had a lock on for over 50 years. .

We wish Savage and ATK all the best with this new venture.

Update

Here are some links for you.

Savage Arms website. They also have a Facebook site linked from that page.

Savage Range Systems web. You can also get there from snailtraps.com.

ATK web should give you some idea of the company’s reach and depth. ATK facebook. They like to hire veterans, by the way.

The Springfield, MA, Daily Republican on the sale of what’s a local business (Westfield is a few miles west — where else? — from the decaying, crime-saturated milltown of Springfield). This article has quite good recent (last 20 years) history of Savage, probably dredged from the paper’s morgue.

An article with the Minnesota business angle.

Update:

The Wall Street Journal’s Amy Or writes a post on the sale, strongly implying (without actually saying) that the motive for the sale was Norwest’s desire to divest evil, icky guns. That appears to be fantasy or fabrication on Or’s part, as she cites no evidence for her implication. (More likely, Norwest did what VC firms do, turned a very good profit in about one year of investment). Or is a byline you probably want to watch for — a dishonest, fabricating reporter. (But isn’t that threedundant?) Of course, what do we know, we’re just MBA investors who know the industry a bit, not innumerate credentialed-but-uneducated J-school grads.

New camo’s coming… so is Christmas

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There are three soldiers in this picture. One is wearing ACU, one multicam, one a ghillie suit. Exercise: which one would get shot first?

…and it’s anyone’s guess which will arrive first.

The new camo’s been needed ever since some decision by some blind person led to the adoption of the dreadful “universal camouflage pattern,” replacing a fairly effective temperate woodland pattern (as seen in the BDU), and a very effective desert pattern (as in the DCU). The decision was taken in unnecessary haste and largely out of irrational envy of the Marines’ trendy new camo uniforms.

To compound a dumb decision driven by envy, came a dumb decision driven by sheer minginess: some MBA in the Pentagon said the Army could save money if it didn’t have to wear different camo to suit different terrain, so the UCP was chosen as a compromise that looks like a woodland pattern in the desert, and a desert pattern in the woodland. It’s not quite as in-your-face as the red coats of General Howe’s wannabe gun confiscators of 1775, but it’s pretty close (see photo).

Yes, saying you could save money by not having different camouflage colors for different-colored backgrounds is a bit like saying we could save money on aircraft if we stopped spending so damned much on making them fly. Astute of you to notice that. Dim of the brass not to. Moving on…

The deficiencies of the uniform are so glaring they’ve even penetrated through the layers of flunkies, sycophants, suck-ups and other human insulation surrounding the Chief of Staff. He noted:

“It’s the wrong color. It’s not the right patterns,” he said. “Every test we’ve done [says] it’s wrong. So we’re going to come up with a new pattern.”

No $#!+, Sherlock.

Of course, it’s so blatantly the wrong color for anywhere on this planet that they went to a better pattern — Crye Multicam — in Afghanistan years ago. So why not just stick to Multicam? If you have to have the dumb idea of one pattern everywhere from the Arctic Circle to the Hindu Kush to Equatorial Guinea to Pata-freakin’-gonia, the guys at Crye have got a better dumb idea than UCP. But no, that’s not the way the system works. It can only rush into a bad idea. It takes all kinds of procurement expertise, and all kinds of years, to take a good one and beat all the merit out of it.

Stand by for that.

Don’t expect much different this time round. The same RDT&E and procurement bureaucracy that dumped UCP on us is driving the train again.

Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office (whose name reflects a fond hope, not a concrete reality) has noted that, hey, we’re wasting a boatload of money when every GO or FO orders up a new salad suit for his minions, and every service would rather their men go naked into battle like Greeks of antiquity than wear something invented by another service. The old suits were cheap because everybody wore the same basic duds, and his service could only… how shall we put it, accessorize him.

So you can tell the guys from the Joint Anything Command. Each one is dressed distinctively — kind of like the Village People.

The waste has been staggering. The Army spent 10 times as much developing the horrible UCP as the Marines spent before them, developing two camo uniforms. Then the Army actually spent more than the staggering amount blown on ACU development, just to approve and issue the COTS Crye Multicam pattern as the OEF uniform (so now they’re into uniform development for 20 times what the Marines spent, and you’d be hard pressed to say any of the Army uniforms is better than the Marine ones).

The GAO report linked above is a section of a longer report that also examines other wasteful government programs.

About those searches in Watertown

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A lot of people are talking about the searches in Watertown, MA. Here’s a typical report from a right-leaning news site, complete with an embedded video that makes it look like something out of some black-hearted European dictatorship or other.

The police came to people’s homes, ordered them to leave immediately at the point of a gun in some cases, and then entered their place of residence. It’s never “consensual” when the person asking you for something has a gun in his hand. “Probable cause” is convenient, but in this case, very arbitrary.

Would you believe, the searches were not like the media has portrayed them? We know, the media have been so crowned with glory in this it’s hard to believe they got some facts wrong, eh? But here are some other facts that have not been in the media. Our local SWAT guys (a regional team) were part of this, as cops were called in from many miles around. And here’s what their instructions were, paraphrased:

Keep safe, but ask whoever answers the door for permission to search. (Most homeowners voluntarily exited and let the police search).
If the homeowner refuses, look for signs of duress.
Absent signs of duress, try to convince them to let you search.
If they continue to deny permission, and are not under duress, thank them for their time and move on.

It doesn’t seem wise to pass on the “event of duress” instructions. As it happened there were no such persons under duress. Two homeowners refused consent, and their homes were not entered or searched. They both said that they had searched their own premises and Flashbang was not hiding within. (This was a little alarming to the cops, who had visions of some unprepared householder coming across a man of such demonstrated violence… but no such event happened).

They followed these instructions, and made a point of thanking householders and apologizing for the intrusion, which may cut no ice with Constitutional lawyers, but goes a long way with the living, breathing members of the actual public. The cops were keenly aware that these were not crack houses, but honest citizens, and they had been quietly told, quote, “you’re not looking for contraband, you’re looking for the terrorist or evidence he was there, period.” Now, this is just one team of many, which searched only a handful of the hundreds of residences inspected, but it’s hard to believe that these cops were the only good and decent ones of the assembled army.

So these weren’t warrantless searches, they were consent searches, a very different animal. The above-linked column suggests that you can never really consent when the man at your door has a gun in his hand. Against that, we offer the fact that people did not consent, and no harm came to them.

There’s plenty to criticize the Massachusetts authorities over. They’re still stonewalling on the records of just how much welfare and school aid the bombers were getting, but they were both living middle-class lives without ever having held a job, so you do the math. And it really looks like the authorities (including the same Federal prosecutor who hounded Aaron Swartz to his death, and then made jokes about it) are going to botch Flashbang’s trial. But the search is not in that class of government misfeasance. If you think that what happened in Watertown was “Gestapo tactics,” you need to hit the books on how the Gestapo and other totalitarian secret police in general operated.

It’s for the children

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Did you realize that there’s a terrible scourge of violence sweeping America? But if only someone, somewhere, had a rare gift for organizing our communities, we could solve that problem. What we really need, it turns out, is a ban on puppies.

America is killing its young people. The killer? Vicious young dogs. Predators that prey preferentially on our kids. Dog bites occur every 75 seconds and over 1,000 citizens require emergency care EVERY DAY as a result of this deadly scourge. In 2012 alone, over 37 people, half of them children, were KILLED in vicious young dog attacks, ranking puppies higher than baby snatchers in childhood mortality.

Worse, over 50% were kids under 8 years old. More disturbingly, over 32% of these vicious attacks were on people LIVING with the dogs in question! Our “best friends” are killing us! Worse, these vicious killers tend to attack in packs. 34% of all fatalities last year were caused by gangs of marauding young dogs, and 58% of these killers were “family” dogs. Equally disturbing, your home is no protection. Over 80% of those killed were killed on their own property!

The economic scale of the human carnage wrought by puppies (for the purposes of this campaign, we define “puppies” as young dogs and adult young dogs), attack victims suffer losses of between $1 billion and $2 billion per year. All statistics are from dogsbite.org

These vicious puppies are growing in number every day, and we are now using well over 5% of our croplands to feed these voracious hounds in what some refer to as “protection payoff” in order keep them from attacking us humans as we sleep. New Zealand scientists report that the ecological Footprint of just ONE puppy is nearly TWICE the footprint of an SUV. Not only are these beasts deadly, they are destroying the environment AND our precious water supply with the massive amounts of bacteria-infested fecal waste generated from the some 70 million puppies that ravage our US communities. This does NOT include the over 21,000 leukemia-related deaths per year from people with known, verifiable exposure to these vicious puppies.

Even with regulations in place by over 600 communities, the killings and attacks and suspicious leukemia continue and the filthy waste keeps piling up. Clearly, these regulations are falling far short of protecting us. Nothing less than a total ban on puppies and puppy mills is acceptable in protecting our environment, water, children and elderly.

That was written by an oil industry lobbyist, and the salient fact of it is that all the factual assertions are true (the New Zealand ecology paper is apparently crap, but it really does say what they say it says). The point of the illustration, of course, is how easy it is to spin the negatives of something that has both costs and benefits when you only tote up one side of the balance sheet.

We leave the discovery of other issues on which the media have used this propaganda technique as an exercise for the reader.

Here at WeaponsMan.com, we’re giving up dogs right about that moment wen you pry the guns out of our cold dead SUV. (We’d arm the dogs — hell, we’d even arm the bears, just to make a mockery of a liberal bumper sticker – but the lack of opposable thumbs on Man’s Best Friend, or Timothy Treadwell’s for that matter, forecloses that option)

Those new reserves are a little jumpy

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As a jumpmaster found out, still a few miles from the DZ:

http://www.liveleak.com/ll_embed?f=33a875beed74

via LiveLeak.com – Army Paratrooper accidentally deploys his reserve parachute inside plane.

Word is, he’s perfectly OK.

There is a sickness loose in this world

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…and sometimes it manifests with weapons. Or with people who used weapons.

Item: The Flashbang Fan Club

Skanky groupie Alisha is crushing on Flashbang. Sick. “I’d hit that,” said our team medic…”with 60,000 IU of penicillin.”

Dzhokar Tsarnayev has “thousands” of female groupies. Some male ones, too. Sick puppies all; this Daily News story has some interviews and photos.

Characteristics the women they present have in common: they’re skanky, and repulsive, even before you compare them to the two lovely young women Dzhokar cold-heartedly killed (along with one grade-school age boy). Even if you just look at the visuals, before you factor in their twisted, corrupted souls.

“She says she’s not a groupie,” says the Post drily about “Alisha,” an 18-year-old, tramp-stamped groupie who’s going to add one of Flashbang’s quotes to her tattoo coverage (what, “allahu akbar?”). Fangirl Ariel Barnes, 19, says in a sentence slathered in fail: “I try to make it a point that I’m not a fangirl.” Try making a different point, m’dear; this one’s a no sale.

“Gianna” is 16, but she shows a wisdom beneath her years when she tweets, “I know hes innocent, he is far too beautiful.” Gianna, you dumbass, learn how to operate an apostrophe, or STFU. But a lot of girls like you felt that way about Ted Bundy. How’s that working out for them?

Taken as a whole, the Flashbang Fan Club is all at once bemusing, disturbing and laugable. Parents, do you know who your teen daughters are crushing on? Hint: it’s not always that relatively harmless assclown Bieber.

Item: picking on the “different” kid, high-explosive style

They do things big down under. So kids getting a little too Lord Of The Flies for their own good don’t just give the autistic kid a wedgie or steal his lunch money: nope, they blew his freaking fingers off with (we are not making this up) a high explosive golf ball.

Assuming (a big word) the media reports are correct, the boys that did this ought to be rendered for valuable chemicals, because they’re clearly no use as human beings. They may grow old but they will never be men: a man protects the weak.

Because that link is to the NYDN and the story’s from Oz and pretty sensational, we thought we’d better check the Australian press and see what they’re saying. Well, pretty much the same thing. One of the bomb makers was “well known to the police”, says the Australian, even though cops think it was merely “a prank” gone awry. The victim is left with one thumb and two little fingers. He doesn’t seem that autistic in this interview (warning, autoplay), which also reports the weapon was “a golf ball filled with flammable [sic] powder and ball bearings.” There’s a ton of coverage Down Under. And a couple of sick kids still running loose.

Item: Illegal carrier has ND, permit holders blamed

And in Florida, some idjit broke a round in Starbucks — in a posted VDZ* mall. This caused all kind of speculation among media and anti-gunners (this phrase approved by the Department of Redundancy Department) about the bloodshed caused by licensed carriers. But that’s not really what went down, as the woman with the gun in her purse wasn’t a licensed carrier. (So, technically, she was a criminal). She dropped her purse and the gun therein fired, hitting her friend. (Just a .25 in the meat of the leg — she’s going to be OK).

Now, how can we say she’s an idjit? Let us count the ways. (1) Carrying unlicensed in an easy must-issue state. Dumb. (2) Lost control of the firearm (in fact, she plausibly says she didn’t know it was in her bag), before she dropped the bag and kB!. Doubly dumb. (3) Her (or her father’s, but idiocy is 80% heritable) choice of pistol, a “Titan .25.”

Early (pre-’68) Titan .25s were simple guns made by Tanfoglio Brothers in Italy. They were reliable, if somewhat crudely finished (Tanfoglio was still learning the ropes — they make much better guns now). But it’s not a great carry gun because of the 180-degree safety, which encourages the careless to leave it off safe and rely on cocking the hammer to fire the weapon (bad idea on this design). The Titan .25 has a non-inertia firing pin — which means it’s liable to fire if dropped when loaded (the safety’s just a trigger block).

Later Titan guns were worse. They still had the safety and firing pin issues, but they were also made from sintered powder metal in Miami. They were built to a price, and the price they were built to is too low to build a safe gun at. QED.

Interestingly, we went to Starbucks’s facebook page to find some of the anti-gun comments others quoted to us, and found the page completely covered by postings from 2A supporters. But in any event, Starbucks’s sensible policy (which is that they follow local law) does not impact this case, because the carrier was not following local law. She’s lucky she’s in Florida, where the prosecutor might give an honest mistake a pass if her friend forgives her, and not in Massachusetts, where she’d be in jail from now until her trial, and then for two years after that.

This last one is really not the same kind of sickness as the other two, except in the people exploiting it to try to disarm the many legal and safe carriers in Florida, or in Starbucks nationwide.

*VDZ: Victim Disarmament Zone. Building or facility posted against legal concealed carry, because the owners and managers want strict, unlimited, joint and several liability for a shooting there….

Update

Apologies to all who have already seen this, and are now seeing it again or having a dupe of it plunge into their RSS. It was supposed to go up on the 14th at 0600, and some genius set it for the 13th instead…

3D Printed Gun Update

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kB!’d and fresh Liberator receivers in ABS plastic.

When we last left Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed, specific files had been taken down and Wilson was being threatened with criminal prosecution for publishing these files online.

But developments in the case have not let up, and are continuing around the clock — now on two continents, at least.

You may be forgiven for thinking Wilson is the victim of not just a runaway bureaucracy, but a political abuse of power. He has an unusual political outlook, one that makes it easy for the political class in general to label and dismiss him. But he’s reasonable, not paranoid; and even paranoids may have real enemies.

Events of the last few days — when it appears that baseless IRS audits have been used to punish such disparate political activists as “tea party” groups, deficit critics, and Jews supportive of Israel — make one suspect that the State Department attempt to cut 3D printed firearms off at the knees is cut from the same totalitarian cloth.

Even if it isn’t, it’s still kneecapping next-generation industry, which is something Washington in general (both parties!) tends to be rather good at. The 3D printing revolution has been one of the most interesting developments in years, and it has a lot of applications to both hobby and production gunsmithing. (Did you know you could 3D print in PLA resin and then use the printed part as a pattern for a lost-resin casting in aluminum or iron? Why is anyone dicking around with plastic parts, then?)

That’s why we follow it… for the technology. But the human drama is also compelling. Here is Wilson, today, defending his decision to comply with the takedown order:

A few have criticized how quickly I responded to the DDTC and began participating in their regulatory process. It is said I should have stood and fought if I believed in keeping the files free, instead of complying. This compliance has been viewed as some kind of ultimate one, as if I don’t intend to do anything else.

…

Now the demonstration is over, and the hard work of having all our rights preserved is just beginning. ITAR might cover 3DP technical data for generations if DD doesn’t intelligently challenge this assertion of authority.

via WikiWep DevBlog..

As one might expect for an aspiring lawyer, Cody Wilson has got counsel assisting him on this one.

Daily Mail reporters snuck this Liberator through the Rapescan machine in the Eurostar terminal.

In a related story, Britain’s Daily Mail tabloid printed a Liberator and took it aboard the Eurostar train. A great deal of pearl-clutching has ensued… of course, in Britain, handgun possession is already a serious offense.

Update 1815R

“3D printing can destroy the spirit of gun control itself,” Cody Wilson told the New York Daily News. Interview and photo at this link.

Marine mortar accident: the heads roll

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Part of being in command is bearing responsibility. That came home for three Marines recently as they all were relieved of their posts, as the investigation into the mortar accident on the range at Hawthorne Army Depot, NV continues.

We’ve previously covered the accident here, here, here and here. Seven Marines were killed and eight more injured when a 60mm mortar blew up during a night live fire. After initially ruling it out, the investigation seems to have settled on a double feed during a “SPENDEX” as having caused the accident — one violation of safety rules. The high casualty count resulted from another violation: a human chain passing the “fire for effect” rounds, putting more men than the crew, who would normally be the only ones in blast radius, in danger.

The battalion commander, company commander, and the battalion’s weapons warrant officer were all sacked last week. New commanders will be selected and the unit will deploy on schedule.

Just for the record, the Marines killed were:

Cpl. Aaron J. Ripperda, 26
Lance Cpl. David P. Fenn II, 20
Lance Cpl. Roger W. Muchnick Jr., 23
Lance Cpl. Joshua C. Taylor, 21
Lance Cpl. Mason J. Vanderwork, 21
Lance Cpl. William T. Wild IV, 21, and
Pfc. Joshua M. Martino, 19.

It seemed to us that their names deserved mention. Training for combat can be quite hazardous; we recall one SF Group that went for years on a streak of killing one Group member on every major exercise or training deployment. The chain was only broken in Flintlock 84, where no one died but scores were hospitalized. (The same hard-luck group lost a team leader to a random Libyan terror attack while he was on leave, lost several guys in the back of still-not-debugged Black Hawk helicopters that burned in during that system’s early years, and had several guys shot down in another helicopter — by the US Air Force). The guys that are dead in training accidents are just as dead as the guys whose names are written on war memorials. Their families feel their absence; their mothers grieve.

Rest in peace, Marines.

New Pentagon Report on China

Why the Chinese andUS defense budgets aren’t comparable,

Or, why China gets more for a dollar.

At first glance the Chinese $119B budget seems like it can’t possibly compete with America’s $538B. We’re outspending them over four to one! But the budgets aren’t really comparable.

The US defense budget is larded with non-defense spending, pork, because of the corruption of Congress.
The US personnel are paid US wages.
China has a draft military, and can fill low-skill enlisted jobs with low-cost national servicemen.
The US personnel costs include an immense and expensive retired cohort, and exploding health-care costs for family members and retirees.
US procurement laws and regulations are complicated and arcane, creating work for legions of lawyers, consultants, fixers and middlemen, roughly quadrupling the cost of DOD items versus free-market purchases.

The Chinese are closing the quality gap, and of course the numerical inequalities have always favored them. Anyway, the .pdf is there. Go read about China, and make your own decisions about whether — and how much — to worry.

Remington’s Staying Put

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In a post to the company’s Facebook page, Remington executives made several points:

They’re staying put in Ilion, New York.
They do not care for the NY SAFE Act and sound like they’re going to work politically to overturn it.
They resent the implication that their latest DOD contract was somehow a payoff for supporting gun control. (This seems plausible. Such large contracts take a long time to set up, and you can’t say that about the SAFE Act, the most reckless and spastically jerry-built bricolage in the long and grim history of legislation).

Remington has a long history in Ilion… a history in which the name has outlived several of the companies that bore it. Originally founded by Federal era gunsmith Eliphalet Remington II in 1816, the firm has been renamed, reorganized, recapitalized, and rejiggered more times than the company’s online history admits. It has been owned by a remarkable range of entrepreneurs, businessmen and gun makers, and currently is the largest jewel in the crown of the Cerberus Group’s collection of gun-industry companies. It has important military contracts and manufactures the M24 and M2010 sniper rifles and the M4A1 carbine, but the bulk of its sales are sporting arms for civilians.

Since Eli’s first homebuilt flintlock rifle made him an accidental gunsmith, historically significant Remington arms have included:

The 1858 revolver and its 1875 cartridge development.
The Model 95 .41 rimfire Derringer, introduced just after the Civil War.
The single-shot Rolling Block rifle, which was made for military and civilian purposes in the 19th Century (crossed Rolling Blocks adorn the flag of Guatemala, where the gun was military issue at independence).
The Remington-Lee rifle, the first small-caliber, smokeless powder gun used by the United States.
Contract manufactured P14 (British), M1891 (Russian), M1903 and M1917 rifles.
The M8, the first successful high-powered semi-auto rifle for hunters.
The 700, an extremely successful bolt-action sporting rifle that spawned the military M24, M40 and M2010 sniper rifles.
The 870, the most successful pump-action shotgun, period.
The ingenious (and arguably over-engineered) Model 51 pistol.
The Nylon 66, the earliest polymer-receiver firearm (a .22 rifle with space-age styling and materials, introduced in the space-age sixties).

All were made in Ilion and the workers, some of whom come from families that have worked at Remington for generations, live in the surrounding area.

The full text of the Remington statement:

To our Remington fans,

We believe the NY SAFE Act is unconstitutional and was passed in a questionable fashion.

Remington and its employees worked diligently with pro-gun legislators to prevent the Act’s passage. We actively participated in the Albany rallies and drove the letter-writing campaign to stop this anti-gun legislation.

The recently awarded Department of Defense (Special Operations Command) contract, questioned by some as a “pay-off,” has been in development for years — it has nothing to do with NY State.

While we are unhappy with the misguided acts of our elected politicians, Remington will not run or abandon its loyal and hard working 1,300 employees without considerable thought and deliberation. Laws can be overturned and politicians voted out of office, but the decisions we make today will affect our people, their families and entire communities for generations.

Please bear with us as we determine the most appropriate way to satisfy our customers and protect our employees.

You may read into that what you like, but what we don’t see there is, “We lost, get over it.” What we see is more like John Paul Jones’s famous shout of defiance, when asked to strike his colors.

It’s going to get interesting in upstate New York.

(Hat tip: Innovation Trail via the indispensable Wire).