Posted on 04/20/2012 1:39:42 AM PDT by neverdem
In a February 2012 fund-raising appearance, President Barack Obama expressed his desire to keep America’s assembly lines humming. “I want to make sure the next generation of manufacturing isn’t taking root just in Asia or Europe,” he told a crowd of supporters. “I want it taking root in factories in Detroit and Pittsburgh and Cleveland and California.…I want to reward companies that are investing here in the United States and creating jobs all throughout this country.” Perhaps because the president was speaking in San Francisco, where most of the local factories had long ago been converted into luxury condos for venture capitalists and software designers, he was short on specifics. Or maybe he just couldn’t think of any American manufacturing industries that still seemed salvageable.
Two weeks earlier, however, a federal agency had released a report that suggested at least one component of the manufacturing sector was not only still making stuff in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, California, and thousands of other places in America, but making more of it than it had in decades. According to the “Annual Firearms Production and Export Report” from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), American manufacturers produced 5,459,240 handguns, rifles, shotguns, and miscellaneous ordnance in 2010. (To comply with the Trade Secrets Act, the BATFE waits one year to publish these data; numbers for 2010 therefore are not published until January 2012.) It was the second year in a row the industry had attained numbers not seen since the glory days of the late Carter administration.
A little more than a decade ago, the domestic firearms industry was staggering like a villain on the wrong side of Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum. “The future has never been more uncertain for America’s oldest manufacturing industry,” a Businessweek cover story reported in 1999. Flat...
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
****A little more than a decade ago, the domestic firearms industry was staggering like a villain on the wrong side of Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum.****
1962 they only wanted to register handguns.
1965 they wanted to register all guns.
1968 PANIC! They got a backdoor handgun registration scheme and a ban on foreign made small guns and banned the import of those evil 5 shot bolt action army surplus rifles.
1972 they wanted to ban small handguns.
1976 they wanted to ban all handguns.
1981 PANIC! they promised to ban handguns and leave rifles and shotguns alone.
1988 they only wanted to ban all handguns and military “assault rifles”.
1993 they banned assault rifles with certain characteristics for 10 years.
2001 Gun control is on a roll! Assault rifles were to be permanently banned, .50 cal rifles were now in their sights! Only a handgun ban was next and they were working on that!
Then 19 Arabs flew four jets into buildings in NY, Washington. Citizens fought back and the 4th crashed in a field.
America woke up and said “WOAH! to gun control..I just might need that handgun and assault rifle at home after all”.
Ruger is an excellent American company.
Its stock symbol is RGR, and it has been on a market boom for some time.
The link below shows RGR’s price growth, when the chart appears, enter SPY for the S&P, DIA for the Dow, or your favorite stock symbol for comparisons.
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RGR+Interactive#symbol=RGR;range=1y
I have made a few posts about owning RGR in the past. Of course those who have a personal bias against RGR try to shoot Ruger down. The market doesn’t listen to bs or personal bias very long.
In disclosure my wife and I both own RGR in our IRA’s, and we wish that we had bought more.
Hawaii’s Gun Dealers Thank President Obama
http://godfatherpolitics.com/4777/hawaiis-gun-dealers-thank-president-obama/
Yes they are! I went to several local Walmarts not long ago and all had beautiful REMMINGTON brand camo and black finish AR-15 variations.
Now if they would just start selling Uberti and Cimmarron brand lever action 1866 and 1873 rifles I would be in hog heaven.
I spoke too soon! They are not $500.00, they are around $700.00 to $900.00 .
BUT THEY HAVE THEM!
Smith and Wesson or SWHC might be a good investment for those who can stand steep roller coaster rides.
We own it and revise our stop loss/sell orders on a regular basis:
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=SWHC+Interactive#symbol=SWHC;range=1y
This is surprising. Hawaii is one of the jurisdictions most hostile to gun ownership ranking right up there with MA, NYC, Puerto Rico, etc.
Just a thought. If Trayvon Martin had just gone home and not gotten macho and attacked an unknown whitey at night and tried to bash his brains in on the sidewalk, he might be alive today. no/s
Trayvon Martin - When ‘Keeping It Real’ goes wrong.
It’s not unusual to have enough components to make twenty or thirty thousands rounds laying around.
And there are plenty of people who have that much actual ammo on hand, but again irrelevant. It doesn't matter how much is on hand, sooner or later it will get used up and then we're back to resupply.
If you are hunting, you are then set for life. But if you are equiping 100 men for battle, what are you going to do next week?
So what are you guys doing about it?
Looks like RGR has done very well for you over the past year.
For us prospective buyers, the PE is too high and I’d like to see a juicier yield.
But good for you!
1. Have lots of ammo
2. Have various firearms using a variety of common calibers, inclusive of military
3. Working to defeat Democrats
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that they don’t want the workman’s comp or insurance hassles involved.
The two machines most likely to produce injuries in a shop are:
1. Drill press.
2. Bandsaws.
There’s no way to put guards, interlocks, etc on these machines and have them do any useful work. They’re very useful machines, but they’re unforgiving of idiots.
And we’re hip-deep in idiots these days.... idiots who have their attorney on speed-dial.
It depends on the ammo and how much you’re willing to spend.
For straight-walled cases (eg, a .45-70 or something similar for a black powder cartridge rifle), .45 Colt/.44-40 revolver rounds, etc... you can make your own cases quite easily with a lathe and a boring bar or pre-sized tooling.
There’s a guy over in Cody who has a tidy little business cranking out cases for obsolete chamberings from brass stock. They’re very expensive, but when you have a gun for which ammo is no longer made, they’re the only option, really.
With a CNC lathe, you can crank out hundreds to thousands of pieces per day.
And when you’re done making cases, you can make lead bullets by either casting or swaging. If you want solid copper pills, you’re back to the CNC lathe.
Large, yes. Specialized, no. The same sort of presses that make cartridge cases also make lipstick tubes, little flashlight bodies, etc.
Producing tubular items from malleable metal is a pretty common operation.
Overall, if you had a 50 ton hydraulic press (a power press would be nice) and some machining capability, you could make your own dies and stamps for making cases in much the same way as it is done in large scale processes.
Still, with a lathe, you could make your own brass. The reason why the industry doesn’t use turned cases is obvious: the amount of waste compared to the final product is huge. With punching, drawing, etc, you have much less waste and higher throughput. Well, brass melts at a low enough temperature that with a heat treatment oven, you could melt down your waste and re-cast it into rods for making more cases. Just keep the swarf clean of other metals, that’s all.
With some thinking and ingenuity, one can make a lot of stuff with very rudimentary tools. The trouble is, the US has become a nation of cubical gophers, and forgotten how to make stuff. With what I’ve learned in the last 10 years, they could go ahead and ban guns, seize the lot... and in a month, I’ll have a working rifle again, made from a truck axle and scrap steel, along with ammunition.
It’s not that difficult, really. Yes, it would take a bunch of work. But it is a LONG way from being “impossible” and it is difficult only the first time. After that, a whole lotta light bulbs go on over your head (unless you’re a complete mechanical klutz) and you see how to do not only what you’re trying to do, but a great many other things too.
Something that really opened my eyes was going through the Browning Firearms Museum in Ogden, UT. They have the Browning Bros. shop re-created in a nook off the main gallery floor. You’d be amazed at how little power tooling they had. They had no mill. They had only a lathe, and a small one at that - something about the size of a South Bend 9” swing, with a long-ish bed. From looking into their shelves of stuff, I could see that they had fixtures for doing milling on the lathe - they had no mill anywhere in their shop. They had a large collection of hand files. And with this minimal tooling, they produced one patentable firearm design after another.
If JMB could do it, so could we.
What people need is a lathe and some training how to use it. Once you have a reasonable lathe, suddenly the world of mechanical widgets swings open as tho you said some ancient magic words.
Nope. Simply too cheap to spend the money.
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