Posted on 08/24/2012 7:32:53 AM PDT by Second Amendment First
ILION, N.Y. — This is the town that Remington built.
Almost 200 years ago, a young man named Eliphalet Remington Jr. forged his first rifle barrel at his father’s ironworks here in the Mohawk Valley. These days, the Remington Arms factory in this village, midway between Albany and Syracuse, is one of the few large manufacturers still prospering in a part of upstate New York that was once filled with them.
But now residents of Ilion, a community whose history and economy are indelibly linked to one of America’s more celebrated gunmakers, are starting to worry about Remington’s future. The recent mass shootings at a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Colorado and at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin have galvanized advocates of tougher gun laws in Albany, and Remington has made it clear that such laws could prompt it to leave New York for a more sympathetic state.
While elsewhere the debate over gun control includes talk of balancing constitutional rights with public safety, here residents are most concerned with a little-discussed element of the gun industry: economics.
Diana Bower, who owns a small engineering business with her husband, a onetime engineer at the Remington plant, said politicians pressing for new gun laws — many of them from New York City — did not realize what was at stake upstate. For example, company officials have said one proposal under consideration would require costly plant retooling.
“If you don’t live here and work here,” Ms. Bower said, “you really don’t know what it means to say, ‘Pass this,’ or, ‘Pass that.’ ”
And Rusty Brown, a furnace technician in the powdered-metal products division at the plant and a former president of its union, spells it out bluntly: “In my eyes, Remington goes away, Ilion goes away.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I am in NH sort of.. SIG is non-union, NH is not too bad on taxes and the work force is highly educated. Still hands off for the most part
Not really, I do engineering consulting with Sig and S&W,the majority of the firearms for both companies are made in the US of A at there plants. SIG is moving to a huge facility in Portsmouth in the next 2-3 months to 3x there capcity. no chick answering a phone there dude. Yes vendors but mostly in the US with SIG being more for mims parts from outside the US.
SIG moved all but a small amount of manufacturing out of Switzerland and Germany to NH.
S&W makes just about everything in the US, very little comes from overseas.
Same with Ruger
All of them have vendors from around the US with a ton of them being in New England still
Yeh or try Washington County Missouri. Lots of bitter clingers here.
One of the poorest counties in the state. We have plenty of room and plenty of people happy to get a job and not have to drive an hour or more to work.
When the mining areas shut down, our main industry was devestated. Bring the whole town(except for the liberals).
Ya’ll move right down here to Georgia! The Atlanta area is just fine.
Really? You mean production for both US and European markets? If so, awesome!
What was mined there?
Remington has firearms plants in Ilion, New York and Hickory, Kentucky (extreme western part of the state), their ammo and component plant is in Lonoke, Arkansas (just outside Little Rock), and their R&R/technical facility is in Elizabethtown, Kentucky (about two miles from where I’m sitting right now).
Tiff and lead not sure what else
What’s “tiff”?
Global market..... in a true sense .
Barite. I didn’t grow up here, so I don’t really know much about the mining industry really. I know that some have called the people here “tiff diggers”.
Lots of old mining land around that people use to ride horses around in. The mines are finally starting to sell off some of it - pretty cheap.
Dresser Minerals was one of the last companies to pull out. Most of the mining companies were already gone before we moved here. Dresser, Pea Ridge, and St Joe are the only ones I really heard about.
Used to work with a guy that has some type of family connection to Springfield. According to him, Chicago and Springfield are where all the anti-gun noise comes from. Apparently the rest of the state is actually very pro-gun, but those two cities have all the pull in the state. See:
And S&W isn’t much different. Their plant is in Western Mass, far away from Boston and Menino. Western Mass, outside of the college towns, has a bit of a conservative streak. Again, the state is run by the big cities.
Interesting — thank you! Free Republic is awesome. You learn new stuff on here all the time!
But it doesn’t really matter. If the cesspits of liberalism in a given state are populous enough that they form an electoral majority, they pass laws and still expect you to obey them even though you live or work in a sane part of the state. How is that a winning proposition?
Its not. Probably more like a shining example of the squeaky wheel, getting the oil. They are the loudest and most in your face, so they get their way so they’ll just STFU. Only thing, they never shut up.
Exactly. If the game has been rigged so that you can’t win, yet your cooperation is needed to keep the game going and they demand you give it, what self-respecting choice do you have but to opt out and go join or start another game?
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