Troy’s consulting arm steps in it … twice.

If the old saw that “there’s no bad publicity” is actually true, Stephen Troy’s tight little network of companies should be riding high. They make firearms and accessories, make parts for some of the biggest-name AR manufacturers, and provide relevant support services, such as training. But the company took a hit from a presumed partner in the 2012 Christmas Season, and its new government-client training arm, Troy Asymmetric, shows that Troy is as capable of an “own goal” as its 2012 nemesis, Dick’s Sporting Goods.

The key person at Troy Asymmetric is Kevin Miles, a retired FBI special agent and bomb tech whom you might have seen on TV during the Boston Marathon bombings. Miles is by all reports a good guy and an okay leader, but his hiring decisions have been so pear-shaped that no other instructors are listed on the website right now, after Illinois gun-rights organization Guns Save Lives exposed two of their new hires’ disastrous pasts.

The first, Jody Weis, needs no introduction to Chicagoland readers, or to people from outside the city who read the excellent Second City Cop blog, the bane of CPD brass hats. Weis was hired from the FBI to be the top Chicago brass hat, and almost immediately found himself at odds with the public and especially the patrol officers in his own department. They named him J-Fed, in a dismissive reference to the then current, now forgotten, celebrity Kevin Federline, K-Fed, and Weis’s constant bleat that “in the Feds we did X better.” It was a good joke because Federline was a loser too small for his ambition, and so was Weis, and he was a former “Fed.” J-Fed’s homunculus dimensions — both physically and in terms of gravitas or metaphorical stature — became the character aspect that cartoonists keyed on, and as J-Fed rolled onward in Chicago, he seemed to shrink day by day. The name didn’t last, either; a very public display of physical cowardice when some of Chicago’s criminal subculture exchanged shots in the very broad and general vicinity of the non-too-courageous Weis renamed him J-Fled.

Weis was a warrior about one thing though: civilian gun ownership. He was agin’ it.

This pusillanimous punk seemed to be an odd choice for Troy, the whole firm having been such stand-up guys over the Dick’s thing (at very great expense to Troy, we might add, who had dedicated their production to a special model for the dicks at Dick’s and wound up with nothing in stores in the best gun Christmas in recorded history). And Stephen Troy quickly canned him, which was the first strike against Miles’s hiring authority (Troy says that Miles “had” unconstrained authority in this area, which implies he hasn’t got it now, and there’s no reason not to believe Troy, except that his record of statements on this subject hasn’t been one to build confidence). But in any event, Weis was deep-sixed.

That’s when GSL found another turd in Troy Asymmetric’s instructional punchbowl: Dale Monroe, the sniper partner of the most reviled sniper to ever beat a murder rap, Lon Horiuchi. (Federal prosecutors used legal maneuvers to immunize Horiuchi from state murder charges on “double jeopardy” grounds). We suppose you could argue with that “most evil” description; in a way Lee Harvey Oswald, Horiuchi’s moral peer, beat his rap, too. Horiuchi is the guy who shot and wounded Randy Weaver and then shot Weaver’s wife, Vicki. Vicki was threatening Horiuchi by holding an infant, whom Horiuchi’s follow-up shots fortunately missed. Monroe was on the glass calling these shots; he has said he’d have taken them, too.

The FBI agents deployed at Ruby Ridge, including Monroe, stood behind Horiuchi, a West Point grad who had joined the FBI after “failing to thrive” in the Army. They all said they’d have taken the shot, too, including Monroe. But the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (the Internal-Affairs-Lite that investigates FBI, ATF, etc. wrongdoing) concluded that Horiuchi’s shot was not justified or justifiable. A special prosecutor charged him with felonies, and he was saved from certain conviction only by skillful navigation of legal technicalities by DOJ lawyers.

Cripes, who’s next?

We don’t know how many other instructors Troy had, or who they might have been, because the company pulled the entire page down. They’re still defending Monroe and his Ruby Ridge partners, though.

But one instructor definitely not on Troy’s staff will be Lon Horiuchi. Apparently Horiuchi himself is still on contract to H-S Precision. (“Half-minute of baby accuracy!”)

You know, Steve Troy, a former Massachusetts State Police officer, talks a lot about integrity. Compare the international chemical giant Degussa, which made Zyklon-B and supplied it for a purpose we all know too well, but at least had the decency not to hire Josef Mengele as an instructor 20 years later.

Update

Since we initially drafted this, Guns Save Life, which originally broke the story, has stayed on it with the perseverance (not to say perseveration) of a riled badger. (They, or one of their contributors, went as far as burning Troy magazines, like Beatles records after the “bigger than Jesus” comment). It did not help Troy to suggest that GSL was lying, and they’d never hired Jody Weis (a position they’ve since retreated from). It did not help Troy to suggest that Troy Asymmetric was a completely different company, with no real connection to Troy Industries, as ARFCOM commenters quickly exposed the lie. GSL recaps this information here.

There are many ARFCOM threads about the subject, with the usual signal-to-noise ratio issues. But there are a couple things that emerged from reading those threads (we did it so you don’t have to). The first is that ARFCOM’s Juan Avila is really trying to do the right thing. Troy’s intransigence on Dale Monroe is really jamming Avila up. The second was a suggestion by one of the posters (in a GD thread, even) that the guy who has the ability to defuse this situation is Monroe. But to do that, he has to come out of radio silence and tell his story. He doesn’t seem to have enough respect for the community (and Troy’s non-Fed customers) to do so.

The saddest of all, perhaps, was the comment by an ARFCOM member known to us as a gunsmith and maker of precision rifles: “I took the Troy sticker off my toolbox today.”