I am not an especially rabid anti-gun person.
I don’t own a gun, and I don’t intend to ever be a gun owner.
If things get so bad that I need one, I’d just as soon get plugged in the eyeball on Day One of the new era.
But I think that if someone wants to keep a hand gun, for whatever reason, they should have at it, as long as they’re smart and decent enough to keep it away from kids and evil doers.
And if someone wants to hunt, be my guest. I don’t want to kill Bambi’s mother, but if hunters want to stock up on venison – or just give in to the primal, atavistic urge to rope a dead antlered creature to the hood of their car – they can have at that, too.
I do part company with gun aficionados when it comes to high volume, shoot ‘em up assault rifles.
Imagine what Grace Kelly would have had to say to Gary Cooper if the shootout in High Noon involved machine guns rather than six-shooters?
In any case, I’m just as happy to live in Massachusetts, which is one of the least gun-toting of states. At 12.6%, we’re third from the bottom. Only New Jersey (12.3%) – so much for The Sopranos – and Hawaii (6.7%) have lower rates. (Source: About.com)
Not surprisingly, we also have the most laws regulating gun ownership, and the second lowest rates of gun deaths (second only to Hawaii). (Source: Bloomberg News.)
More surprisingly, we’re the home to quite the gun industry.
In the Boston Globe’s recent listing of the leading 100 companies in Massachusetts, the top gun was Smith & Wesson.
In fact there are, in the Connecticut River Valley* (which includes Connecticut), a.k.a. “Gun Valley”, “dozens of firearms manufacturers and suppliers”.
While not in “Gun Valley,” my home town used
to have a big gun manufacturer, Harrington & Richardson, which built M16’s during the Vietnam War. While I was making combat boots at H.H. Brown Shoe, one of my friends worked one summer in the office of H&R.
Harrington-Richardson is no more, but, let’s face it, in the US of A, guns ‘r us:
Gun sales are soaring across the nation, with many manufacturers having posted record profits in 2012. And no matter where you fall on the gun debate, there’s no argument that this expansion has very real economic implications for a struggling region. There’s even a chance that the current boom could see guns reprise their role from two centuries ago, powering the growth of other high-skill manufacturing throughout the area.
Although California and Texas are home to more gun-related jobs, Connecticut and Massachusetts rank fourth and fifth in total economic output from this industry, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms trade association. (Source: Boston Sunday Globe.)
Most of the gun slingers around here aren’t household names like Smith & Wesson and Colt in Hartford. There’s also And Savage Arms - is that a great name or what? – in Westfield, where they make sport/hunting rifles, and where there are workers making decent money making guns that people from somewhere else are – fortunately or unfortunately – buying a lot of.
Once of the brink of destruction,
[Savage’s] year-over-year growth was 50 percent in 2011, 40 percent in 2012, and is on pace to pack on another 40 percent in 2013. The company is running round-the-clock shifts on weekdays and has added one on Saturdays. It has about 415 employees in Westfield, nearly double the number from just three years ago and part of a companywide workforce of 740. And it is racing to hire more. The Westfield factory made and shipped more than 350,000 guns in 2012, while also distributing another 300,000 that were made at Savage’s Canadian plant or by the vendors in China and Turkey that produce the company’s cheaper Stevens brand weapons. One company projection calls for the Westfield plant to be producing 650,000 guns by 2015 and distributing more than 1 million in total.
By the way, the boom in gun ownership is not coming about because more individuals own guns:
Even as sales soar, only about one-third of US households have guns, down from about half in the 1970s.
But the folks who own guns tend to own more of them.
I’m not sure if I should find this settling or unsettling, but I think I’m leaning towards unsettling.
And while Savage if busily manufacturing sporting rifles, which give the deer and the antelope a sporting chance, Smith & Wesson is doing so well in large part because if makes assault rifles. (Industry euphemism: “modern sporting rifles.”)
Whatever guns they’re building, gun companies provide decently paid, reasonably skilled, blue-collar jobs. Because the jobs required skilled labor, they didn’t migrate South with the textile mills. Still, gun companies fell on some hard times, and the recent Armageddon’s-just-around-the-corner mania has certainly contributed to its resurgence.
As are the technological innovations that have lowered the cost of making guns, thus encouraging “existing gun owners and collectors to buy more of them.”
Which is good for the workers in “Gun Valley,” if not an unalloyed benefit to the country as a whole.
It’s never all that simple, is it?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
*The Connecticut River Valley is also the home to a lot of tobacco farms, which always manages to surprise people. They grow shade tobacco, which is used for cigar wrappers. My husband’s aunt and uncle owned a tobacco farm which they converted into a golf course in the 1960’s, but there are still plenty of working farms around their neck of the woods.
No comments:
Post a Comment