Posts Tagged → manufacturing
Ruger is about to be eaten alive
While the American gun world is presently enthralled by the ATF’s latest effort to deep-six the NFA and emasculate the GCA, and make SBRs and sawed-offs and suppressors available for all, we have something much more prosaic to discuss here. And it sucks.
Bill Ruger, Sr., was a famously driven man, a true American, who from his earliest adult years made unique, high quality guns that he wanted to make. These were firearms not yet on the market by any other manufacturer, and with no indications that there ever would be a market for them. They were often modeled after guns that had at one time been centerpieces of the foreign sporting world, like elegant, accurate British and Scottish-made Farquarson action single shots. And yet the markets followed him. In fact, Bill Ruger created markets not just for his own guns, but for whole categories of guns that Americans had not shown interest in for a hundred years, if ever.
Like the Ruger #1, a single shot, based on the Henry/ Farquarson action. Simple, rugged, exceptionally accurate, capable of all kinds of Africa-scale rounds. He also made side-by-side shotguns, and over-under shotguns, when both were falling out of favor to blastemall semi-autos. In fact, many younger Americans had never actually seen a double barreled shotgun in person, when Ruger brought his Red Label onto the market. Like the Bearcat and subsequent revolvers, introduced at a time when cowboy-style guns were long out of style.
Bill Ruger adapted investment casting for many of his firearms, which saved a lot of money in laborious machining and turning raw stock. He revolutionized modern gun manufacturing so well that competing companies, like Colt, began chasing the new markets that Bill Ruger had opened, often adopting his manufacturing methods in part or in full.
One of my favorite rifles is a 1980s Ruger M77 RSI International .308, that is as light and as pointable as a stalk of goldenrod, as accurate as a laser, and easy to carry all day long. Because it is so exceptionally light, short, and handy, and has a thumb safety on the tang, it is exceptionally fast on snap shots while stalking deer and bear in the mountains. My M77 RSI has killed countless deer and one bear. But the challenge with the M77 RSI is that Ruger had the short, thin, finely tapered barrels milled with the scope mounts integral to the barrel. Like the Germans used to do (and occasionally still do) on their finest sporting rifles. While a fabulous little work of art, the manufacturing costs for this gun were too high, and it was discontinued in the early 1990s. Tang-safety M77s were made a few years more, and then the ridiculous wing safety was used on all subsequent M77s. No still hunting for you!
Recently, Ruger bought out the old Marlin machinery from the old Remington plant in Ilion, New York. I toured that factory about fifteen years ago, and what a loss that it is now gone, that the workers there are gone, that the Remington name is now gone from the town of its founding after more than two hundred years. Crappy or shady business practices caused the new-new-new Remington to fail, even though it produced many good products. Though the old Marlin 1895 was not well made in the Remington plant, with “Remlin” rifles pretty low on the totem pole.
Well, Ruger took the lever action world by storm when it resuscitated the Marlin 1895 a few years ago, in its state-of-the-art Mayodan, North Carolina plant. Flawless, incredibly accurate, reliable, rugged, this stainless lever gun in its original 45-70 became the go-to for Alaskan big game guides in grizzly country. It is the gun I take hunting in Alaska. I have killed several deer and a bear with mine. One shot kills, one at 160 yards with open sights (my eyes are aging and that kind of shooting just ain’t happening any more, sadly).
And Ruger has also continued to make all the oldies-but-goodies that are cornerstones of the gun owning world: The GP100 .357, .44 Mag Redhawk, .44 Mag Blackhawk, .45 Colt Vaquero, and Bearcat revolvers, the Ruger Number 1 single shot, and the M77 series of rifles, among others.
Ruger can continue to run a perfectly successful business making these “legacy” models, because while their markets are not on fire, like the 1895 is, they are steady. Their customers want them. Not by the truckload, but enough to keep several highly trained workers busy full-time, and money coming in steadily.
But Ruger is about to be eaten alive in a foreign corporate takeover, and the company has already notified its customers that it is dropping an awful lot of the oldies-but-goodies, including most of the revolvers. Whether this decision is a tactical retreat under the turtle shell by current ownership, in order to shed less-productive or under-performing, or expensive to make products, balance the books, and shield against the coming hostile takeover attempt, or is a giant flash increase in short-term profitability so that the takeover costs as much as it possibly can, who can say. The fact is, Beretta is gunning for Ruger, and it appears that they are likely to take over.
And Ruger is showing the signs of a prey animal. Tossing stuff overboard in an attempt to pick up speed as it flees its pursuer.
Forgive my national pride and my national interest bit, but I am not happy about losing another indigenous firearm manufacturing company to a foreign country. Yeah yeah yeah, Beretta is 500 and some years old. Whateva. Great. I like that. Good for Italy. But that means nothing of consequence to any of us Americans, when what we need are Ruger replacement parts easily obtainable here in America, sold to us by Americans on the phone.
Remington 3.0 went to the Great Gun Maker in the sky a few years ago. Winchester bounced back and forth between the Japanese and the Belgians, and now exists in some purgatorial form that occasionally shows up like a ghost, and then disappears back into the shadows, again. Colt has barely hung on, same for Smith & Wesson. America’s native gun makers are Henry, Taylor’s (which also imports quality Italian firearms), Barrett, a few other small shops specializing in hyper accurate sporting rifles. America needs all the gun makers it can get, making not just sporting weapons but military weapons, too. We cannot survive if we outsource our weapons acquisitions to foreign makers.
America needs Ruger. But it appears we are getting Beretta, and there is no way that firm is going to run the company the Bill Ruger way. Here comes the corporate slashing and bleeding, the loss of fabulous guns, and the loss of American jobs, in the name of maximum profit. Maybe Beretta wants a lever action shotgun, and is acquiring Ruger just for that. I guess that might be in the spirit of ol’ Bill.
Ruger’s M77 RSI International in .308, that has killed over a hundred deer in my hands, a bear, some other critters. Just recently topped with a now discontinued Leupold 1×5, perfect for the slow mountain still hunting I enjoy
Ruger Marlin 1895 in 45-70 with shed buck I shot in Dauphin County a few years ago. Laser accurate gun
Abandoned mine site in remote Alaska, five mile walk in from dead-end dirt road. Over a week of hunting this area, I saw moose and griz aplenty, heard a wolf pack howling, passed up on a smaller black bear I literally walked right up to and looked over. Having my own handloaded brass solids in the Ruger Marlin 1895 was the most reassuring feeling
Hunting in Alaska requires all kinds of layers, and waterproofs, rubber boots, and stainless rifles. The Ruger Marlin 1895 is my go-to gun for these trips
I saw China dumping today
Today, I saw tangible evidence of China just outright dumping its products at give-away prices, way below manufacturing cost. It was such a dramatic sight that it made me wonder why they are doing this. Come along with me on this trip, and see what conclusions you come to yourself about what we see together.
This morning I arrived at the Pine Run Auction in Linden, PA, good and early. Got my bidder card, #6, and walked around, looking at the items coming up for auction starting at 9:00am. Nearly everyone in attendence looked the same, dressed the same, was the same age. It was humorous, because when I threw on clothes this morning, I thought surely I would be overly rustic. Nope. We all looked the same, all the old rural northcentral Pennsylvania guys. Well, “old” is a relative thing; I was one of the younger men there. And the truly young were in their forties…..
Among the rusty old American farm machinery, tri-axles, crates of machinery attachments, tools, the almost-retired CAT excavators and the chipping and peeling John Deere bulldozers, lay piles, literally piles, heaps, of shrink-wrapped brand-new Chinese made machines. I mean piles. Brand new.
Being sold by the bushel.
Mini excavators and their extra attachments, mini skid steers, machines designed for the enterprising individual American man, sold for a few hundred dollars each. Barely their value as scrap steel. Photos below, if you doubt me.
Begging the question: What is China doing? Why are they taking these huge losses? Is China being beaten down by American tariffs, as our president said they would? Is China’s economy in free-fall? Is China in big economic trouble?
Or is China so wealthy and successful that they can afford to literally just give away their most expensive consumer products, at this huge loss? Imagine all of the myriad other little auction houses like Pine Run, all across America, all auctioning off these same machines, attachments, for pennies. This is a huge amount of steel, rubber, hydraulic fittings, and petroleum stuff being just wholesale dumped across America, by our biggest frenemy.
My impression is that this is the behavior of a drowning person.
Pine Run Auction of Linden, Pennsylvania, might be just one molecular data point in a galactic constellation of economic activity data points generated by one and a half billion human beings (America plus China). But there are calculus equations for calculating the slope (the direction) of a single data point, and while I can barely do one plus one type calculus, my gut instinct about today’s Pine Run Auction is that the Chinese economic slope is heading in a severe angle straight toward the planet’s surface in a huge flaming fireball.
Part of the bidding gang. A lot of bidders participated by Proxibid
Chinese mini excavators that should have cost thousands of dollars, sold for huundreds each.
Steel attachments for the Chinese-made excavators, many of which sold for more than the matching machine, because they will be re-fabricated and adapted for other American machines
Interesting concept, a mini-skid steer. Stacks of them. Selling for hundreds of dollars. How much did China pay to make these, versus how many pennies did they get back?
Cowboy hats and bib overalls, rural America, baby. Way off in the distance Bald Eagle Mountain is visible through the open bay doors
ICE & Tariffs are acid test of loyalty to America First
Support for secure American borders and controlled (and highly limited) immigration is a basic tenet of loyalty to America. People who want open borders and all of the chaos and cultural destruction that follow are by definition enemies of America, as it was founded and run for the past 250 years. We cannot have open borders and have a nation, especially a nation of laws, and a nation of laws that are applied equally to one and all. When borders are erased, the nation is erased.
That Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become the target for de-funding and dissolution by an entire political party says a lot: That political party is once again, like it was in 1860, the main domestic enemy of America. That political party wants to dissolve ICE, and with it, dissolve America.
Please, do not tell us that you are a Democrat, but that you “don’t agree with that.” Like the Democrats who I know personally, and love, and yet do not understand.
If you are a registered Democrat who votes for elected Democrats, who are trying to implement open borders policy, then you are supporting open borders and all that flows from it. So, opposing open borders, and supporting ICE, is one acid test of loyalty to a constitutional American republic, as founded.
A second acid test of loyalty to America is support for tariffs on our trading partners. Tariffs protect American manufacturing businesses, American jobs, many American unions, and often equally match foreign tariffs on American products tit-for-tat. Saying that you are for tariffs tells us straight-up that you want America to be treated equally by its trading partners, and that you do not want American jobs to be shipped overseas to our competitors. Supporting tariffs also says that you want America to enjoy having strategic depth across a universe of business sectors and manufacturing areas. Without strategic depth in domestic production, America is at a great disadvantage against our trading partners and enemies.
A classic example of domestic weakness is the array of critical minerals and metals that America depends upon and which we source from outside America. Most come from unstable regions where child slaves and environmental catastrophes go hand-in-hand with the related mining, or from enemies like China, who can use embargoes to damage American military and communications production. Tariffs correct artificial market inequities, and create financial incentives for domestic production and mining within America.
Yes, conventional modern economics states that tariffs have a negative rebound effect on American consumers, who supposedly end up paying for those tariffs when they buy foreign products imported into America. Without question there is some truth to this, especially in the early stages of tariffs on certain products, especially things like furniture. And yet there is also a ton of evidence to the contrary, where once America met tariffs on us with tariffs on them, our own domestic capacity was once again incentivized to giddyup and go.
I myself have a front row seat on the tariff policy debate. In the world of hardwood timber, logs, and lumber, we are witnessing a one-two punch in the international markets that has caused hardwood products to hold steady in a low area. When China’s domestic demand for American hardwoods dropped several years ago, then our log and lumber prices fell commensurately. We used to cut certain hardwood species and put them right onto shipping containers bound for Asia; not much right now.
Add tariffs to that weak Chinese demand, and we have a suppression of our hardwoods markets. As a result, a lot of Pennsylvania and New York sawmills have gone out of business in the past couple of years. And timber is a poor investment right now. However, as painful and as scary as this situation is, it is the kind of natural market correction America needed. I cannot blame President Trump for this situation, and frankly, I cannot really blame AutoPen Biden for it, either, as these are supply-and-demand forces beyond America’s control. One thing President Trump can and did control, however, was the matching of tariffs on Chinese wood flooring and furniture with American tariffs of our own.
Why not? If you love America, and you want America to survive and thrive, then you want Americans to stop giving away our products, our money, our jobs, our natural resources. Tariffs do that, quite well. Especially when you live in the Number One Trading Partner nation in the world, America.
In conclusion, if you oppose ICE and secure borders and controlled legal immigration, then you are for chaos and the destruction of America. Just like you were an outside enemy seeking our failure. And if you oppose tariffs, or you oppose giving the president the power to tariff trade items, then you really have it in for our American union workers, and you hate our small towns and manufacturing plants. You have then failed two acid tests of your loyalty to America.
And if you are disloyal to America, you should not be surprised when people like me, loyal patriots, view you with great skepticism. But then, if you belong to the political party of 1860 insurrection and slavery, you are already used to that…and it seems you wear that big scarlet “A” as a badge of honor!
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Happy New Year, America!
Happy New Year, America!
And yes, it sure is happy! The year 2026 marks America’s 250th anniversary, which is a big accomplishment.
Like many other people I know, I share in a general feeling of optimism about America’s future, both short term and long term. I am seeing prices of things that are important to me every day, like gasoline, come down significantly, while other things increase in value, not simply cost, like gold and silver, as a measure of anticipated American-based manufacturing.
The idea of having American manufacturing jobs again is thrilling. Manufacturing jobs once sustained whole American families, and communities. And then busy-body know-it-alls decided it was better for China to have unfettered pollution and also unfettered economic growth. I have never figured out how anyone who cares about America or a clean environment promoted that outcome as a solution to water and air quality challenges here.
All 1970s environmentalism did was shift the pollution from being scientifically managed here in America to being completely unmanaged and unmitigated and unmeasured in China. Sure looks like the environmentalists just wanted to undermine America, at any cost. Which means the environmemtal movement wasn’t about environmental quality; rather, it was about economic warfare against America.
And I got to see that personally as an EPA policy staffer in Washington, DC. Not good. This is being corrected as I write these words.
Anyhow, while there is a lot of political unhappiness and fraudulent crookery going on in the news, my spirits remain high. America is on a good trajectory, and hopefully I get to ride along on that successful arc, along with everyone else who wants to earn their money honestly.
Wishing everyone a Happy New Year, a successful New Year, a healthy New Year. See you in 2026!
No pain, no gain
The old gym motto “No Pain, No Gain” applies to the much-needed economic shakeup the Trump Administration is bringing to the entire planet. If we Americans do not put up with a little temporary pain and necessary readjustment now, for our own good, then we will enjoy no huge gain later on. It takes work to then earn and enjoy resulting benefits.
President Trump’s promise to American citizens was that he would return us to glory days, a golden age, which we richly deserve. Trump is correct that America has been the world’s piggy bank for decades, due to the huge tariff and trade imbalance. We should add that being the world’s piggy bank is an unsustainable and unfair arrangement paid for by the long forgotten American taxpayers, who see very few benefits in return for handing over their hard-earned cash to every Tom, Dick and Harry the American bureaucracy could dream up.
As we have learned over the past eight weeks from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), trillions of American taxpayer dollars have been illegally mis-spent on millions of dubious schemes, ideas, organizations, and fantasies, many of which directly aimed at harming the United States. American taxpayers have been funding their own sworn enemies through agencies like USAID, DHS, EPA, HHS, and the Department of Education.
In other words, domestic enemies here in America were running the federal government, and using our tax money to damage and destroy America. This egregious situation is only in addition to the lopsided international tariff arrangement that has grown out of control since about 1920.
The tariff situation is egregious by itself. All kinds of countries we Americans think of as “allies” have had heavy tariffs placed on importing American food and manufactured products, including milk and dairy, steel, etc. Many of these countries’ governments paid what minimal tariffs that the USA had in turn on products being imported into America, in effect buoying up their own private businesses.
America did not do that for our own businesses, and in fact America has had very low to no tariffs on most imports. And now after essentially handing over our own wealth and manufacturing sectors to foreigners for decades, we are tired of being the economic piggy bank or punching bag or host body for all of these takey-takey people around the world. It is hard to understand why Americans, particularly working and taxpaying Americans, support this large imbalance and wealth transfer from America to the world.
And yet, as we see, plenty of working Americans are arguing against tariff parity, and are setting fire to Tesla cars and dealerships as a form of protest against DOGE finding and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money. Do you have to be mentally ill to belong to that one political party? Do you have to be self destructive to be a voting member of that one political party?
Do you have to hate America, Americans, the rule of law, and everything great about America to belong to that one political party?
Why would any normal American belong to that one political party?
Just as DOGE is causing Americans to take a long hard look at federal government mismanagement, Trump’s tariff parity is going to cause a shake-up in our international trade relationships, no doubt. It is going to cause some re-arrangements of pricing and products we are used to having easily available to us. For example, cheap Chinese crap on Amazon is probably not going to be as cheap any longer. And yesterday the Princess of Patience and I went to look at a new car for her, and we see how the new tariff parity might effect car prices. We learned that those foreign-brand vehicles already ordered and in the pipeline are not subject to tariffs (our family is positively prejudicial in favor of Toyota vehicles).
Of course, foreign brand vehicles made here in America are not subject to tariffs, either, and many Toyota cars and trucks are made in America.
Long and short of this subject is give these policy changes time to work. Already America is seeing immediate positive responses from many foreign trading partners, who are lowering their own tariffs because they know that their own industries cannot afford to absorb Trump’s tariffs. They will lose their export markets if they lose American buyers. So just be patient, remember that this is all being done for your own good and your own bank account, and know that it will work out well.
Putting up with these changes is like making deposits into your bank account. You might feel like you are missing opportunities to party with your money in the short term, but in the longer term you will be very happy.