A lot of those machine tool companies were in New England. We are now infested with libtards, but still make shit ton of guns.
1978-1981 I worked at a family-owned manufacturer of super precision ball bearing lead screws and I recognize the names of those NE companies...We made their ball screws, and by mid-1980 we had incorporated a half-dozen or so Asian-made CNC machine tools on the shop floor. There was also a huge increase in the number of customer orders requiring metric threads. There was a lot of momentum towards foreign imports from Japan and Korea and it coincided with the slump in the automotive industry.