Posted on 10/15/2021 8:34:24 AM PDT by rellimpank
From his desk, Ryan Busse could hear his boss ranting that the country’s largest gun manufacturer, Smith and Wesson, had betrayed its peers in the industry. Just a year after the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, Smith and Wesson had reached a settlement with the White House agreeing to a slew of safety measures, including trigger locks on all its new guns. Now other gun makers — including Kimber America, which employed Busse — would surely be pressured to do the same.
The National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action accused Smith and Wesson of “craven self-interest” for striking a deal that would drive up manufacturing costs for everyone in an attempt to get itself out of a perilous lawsuit. After consulting with his boss, Busse, a young firearms salesperson, set to work calling and faxing his contacts at gun dealers across the country and asking them to boycott Smith and Wesson.
“We didn’t need to be told. We just rushed to sign up for battle,” Busse, now 52, wrote in Gunfight, a memoir about his years in the gun industry set for release Oct. 19. By the end of the day, Busse had convinced at least 50 major dealers to stop doing business with Smith and Wesson.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Those people have destroyed the NRA.
Excuse me sir. Yes you. The one who just barged into my home. Can you give me a minute to undo the trigger lock on my gun?
2A bump for later....
In other news Ryan Busse has a lovely collection of silver coins.
Thirty pieces in all.
All the stories of those formerly against guns, but for them now, don’t exist to the media. Only one narrative fits.
Triggered a weird memory of the documentary of a middle aged American man living in North Korea with his North Korean wife and pictures of dear leader everywhere in his home describing how wonderful it was.
This guy has been a problem for a while. Just one example from the MSN free publicity piece for his garbage book:
“He told industry leaders that he backed legislation that would have strengthened background checks on private gun sales after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. It failed. Six years later, after another school shooting, this time at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, Sara’s (his wife) anger boiled over. She posted on Facebook that she hoped people would back their prayers for Florida with action: “The ONLY way this will EVER change is if the NRA goes up in FLAMES!””
The Big Lie that the Democrat and MSM machine has spread for decades now is that they want “universal background checks” on private sales. That’s scripted to sound kind of innocuous, but in reality, their solution is to simply ban private sales altogether, so they get their back-door gun registry. As with so many things, California lead the way with this: all sales have to be conducted through an FFL, who will have the buyer fill out a 4473, and run him through NICS. Voila! There’s the record they want.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. If you wanted to sell a gun to a friend, you could both go down to the local FFL (whom you both probably know well), and have a NICS check run. There’s no need to have the serial number, or even type of gun entered into the form, if all that is meant to do is make sure that a “prohibited person” isn’t buying your gun.
But that’s not what they’re really after.
Smith & Wesson is a solid pro-2A company today, but back then S&W was British-owned, and the President of S&W cut a deal with the Clinton Administration to support Clinton's Assault Weapon and large capacity magazine bans.
Here is an NRA-ILA article from March of 2000:
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20000320/the-smith-wesson-sellout
On April 27, 1999, President Bill Clinton officially declared his Administration's war on American gun owners by identifying his enemy: "another culture in our country, that I think has gotten confused about its objectives (the) huge hunting and sport shooting culture in America."
Smith & Wesson, Inc., a British-owned company, recently became the first to run up the white flag of surrender and run behind the Clinton-Gore lines, leaving its competitors in the U.S. firearms industry to carry on the fight for the Second Amendment. Of course, there is no Second Amendment in Britain, where subjects are barred from owning handguns and many long guns.
In an act of craven self-interest, on March 17, 2000, Smith & Wesson (S & W) signed an agreement with the Departments of the Treasury and Housing and Urban Development in order to be dropped as a defendant in a handful of reckless lawsuits filed by municipalities against the firearms industry. Only a day after the settlement was announced, HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo and the mayors of Atlanta, Detroit and Miami moved to shore up the S & W maneuver by promising to contort their procurement policies and purchase only the company's guns.
The media instantly portrayed the settlement as an agreement by S & W to adopt gun safety measures. In fact, the settlement doesn't merely alter the design of S & W handguns--it elevates S & W to the role of self-appointed arbiter of national gun policy.
Distributors and dealers who want to continue to sell S & W products will be forced to agree to a wish list of gun-prohibitionist demands such as: 14-day waiting periods, bans of affordable self-defense handguns, paying for anti-gun advertising, to name a few.
"I'm not willing to be a pawn in a political chess game," S & W CEO Ed Shultz is quoted in the March 27, 2000, edition of Newsweek. Yet by signing this sweeping agreement, Shultz has become exactly that, manipulated by the Administration into executing a "settlement" that is widely portrayed as a political victory for the White House.
Yet the agreement dispenses with only a third of the municipal lawsuits, and binds only two federal agencies and two state attorneys general from filing suits in the future. The remaining city suits are unaffected, and other state and federal agencies can continue to threaten the industry at will. The price of S & W's maneuver falls primarily on others--lawful firearm dealers, distributors, other manufacturers and law-abiding American citizens.
Here are just some of the terms of the S & W/Clinton-Gore Administration agreement:
CONSUMER IMPACT . . .
* Prohibited from buying more than one handgun in a 14-day period.
* Prohibited from buying a firearm without passing an unspecified safety test.
* Prohibited from buying a self-defense handgun that did not meet arbitrary accuracy standards.
* Prohibited, if under age 18, from even walking into the firearms section of a sporting goods store unless accompanied by a parent or guardian.
DEALER IMPACT . . .
* Prohibited from selling legal semi-automatic rifles, commonplace ammunition magazines and firearms that do not meet the difficult standards established in the agreement.
* Prohibited from selling firearms at any gun show where any legal private sale is conducted.
* Required to include with every firearm sold, a false written statement in large bold-face type that hundreds of children die each year from firearm accidents.
* Required to carry $1 million in liability insurance and perform tasks properly handled by law enforcement to comply with the edicts of a new "Oversight Commission."
MANUFACTURER IMPACT . . .
* Prohibited from marketing any firearm in a way that appeals to young shooters and hunters.
* Required to dedicate 1% of revenues to a propaganda campaign promoting the dangers of gun ownership.
* Required to support legislative efforts to reduce firearms misuse and development of "smart" gun technology.
* Required to "ballistically fingerprint" every firearm, thus setting up backdoor national firearms registration.
* Required to meet certain unproven design standards for handguns sold only to civilians--guns sold to military and police would be exempted, thereby showing the intent is not to make guns safer or better, but to impose standards that will ultimately eliminate sales, to private citizens.
* Required to manufacture pistol with positive, manually-operated safety devices as determined by BATF standards applying to imported handguns. BATF has repeatedly handed down politically-driven misinterpretations of the "sporting purposes" importation law, to prohibit many semi-auto rifles and handguns.
CONCLUSION:
Sold as getting S & W out from under reckless litigation, the true intent of this agreement is to force down the throats of an entire lawful industry anti-gun polices rejected by the Congress, rejected by legislatures across America, and rejected by the judges who have dismissed their lawsuits in whole or in part nearly without exception.
Screw the NRA.
GoA, all the way!
He appealed directly to the NRA membership.
There was just too much money in it, and those making the money were able, with illegal shenanigans, to throw Neal off the board.
The NRA saw they needed to deliver to the membership, and they started supporting Constitutional Carry, and some other issues. But they refuse to heed warnings about operating in New York State.
I think they will survive. The question is how much damage will Letitia James (AG of New York) be able to do before the NRA is able to reconstitute itself.
Yup, they tried to pay him off by offering him a lucrative contract to have his own TV show on NRA TV, but when Ollie started questioning some of the financial activities of Wayne LaPierre, that's when Oliver North was forced to resign from the NRA.
The REAL 2A risk is when ONLY Democrats are allowed to own guns. . .
Biting the hand that feeds you......
IIRC: MAMA bought the gun used in the Sandy Hook shooting-—not the perp.
MAMA gave the gun to the perp....OR he stole it when he killed her first.
Yes, I believe that is correct. He murdered her, and then went on his rampage.
None of these ever-green gun-grabs would have affected that.
Of course, if you ask them in private, they’ll admit that the real goal is the elimination of private firearm ownership entirely. They know that won’t sell, so they are forced to lie.
Gun locks may come with guns, but much as guns do not fire themselves, neither do they put the locks on themselves. Think of gun locks as vaccines for guns. My guns are unvaccinated, so they are free to allow me to infect anyone that enters my house without permission with lead.
The NRA is in serious trouble, and the corrupt Board of Directors and the executive VP Wayne LaPierre can pound sand.
Those people have destroyed the NRA.
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People will own guns with or without the NRA
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