After Orlando, the Homemade AR-15 Industry Surges

From Wired via H/T at Instapundit:

Guns are pretty easy to make, and modern tools make them much easier.

IN THE WAKE of the worst mass shooting in US history, many Americans want to ban civilians from buying the AR-15, that ultra-popular, all-American killing tool. But in basements and garages around the country, another group of Americans is collecting the machines and materials to make those firearms in the privacy of their own homes. And for them, just as much as for gun control advocates, Orlando represents a call to arms.

Regulation is futile.

And drives liberals crazy!

John Moses Browning's Birthday was Saturday

From A View From The Porch via H/T at Instapundit:

We’re talking about the dude who patented the concept of the SLIDE on autoloading pistols. The guy who pretty much invented gas-operated automatic weapons. The man who made the first practical and commercially successful self-loading shotgun. The way a Glock works? Browning patented that. You don’t like old-fashioned hammer-fired guns? Browning’s first commercially successful pistol, the FN Model 1899, was striker-fired. Other than the nameless individual who first stuffed fireworks powder into a metal pot and used it to launch a ball, there’s probably no other single individual who had such an influence on firearms as we know them today.

The influence of John Browning on modern weapons can not be understated.

Value of Gun Maker Stocks Nearly Doubled in 2015 Alone

From Breitbart's Big Government:

In a year marked by a relentless Democratic push for more gun control, stocks of two of the most prominent gun makers—Smith & Wesson and Sturm, Ruger & Co—saw their value nearly double.

In fact, Smith & Wesson’s stock more than doubled—going “from $9.47 to $21.98″—but Ruger fell just short of doubling by going “from $34.63 to $59.61.”

Taken together, the performance of Smith & Wesson and Ruger continued their record as “two of the best performing stocks in the US.”

As The Guardian points out, “Over the past five years, stocks of Smith & Wesson increased in value sixfold while stocks of Sturm, Ruger and Company quadrupled in value.” To put this growth in value into perspective, The Guardian reports that “Apple stock remained almost unchanged over the past year and only doubled in value over the past five years, reaching about $105 a share this year compared with $46 in 2010.”

Schadenfreude!

B. Hussain Obama may turn out to be the greatest salesman of guns in the history of the country.

The Greatest Blunder In Commercial Firearms History

From The Firearm Blog:

What sort of mistake could possibly take the top spot of “worst decisions in firearms history”? It would have to be a decision that not only in retrospect but at the time was one of the worst possible decisions a company could make, and it would have to have longstanding aftereffects that would change firearms history forever.

It would have to be a decision like… Winchester Repeating Arms Co. parting ways with the famous John Moses Browning (page 152):
.....................

 It may seem impossible today, but it’s true that in 1903, Winchester let go of the firearms designer that would eventually hold the virtually indisputable top spot among firearms designers in the entirety of history. Winchester felt that John Moses Browning, inventor of almost countless entirely new kinds of firearms, was simply too expensive to keep on the payroll.
..........................

It is quite unthinkable to the modern mind that any company could possibly let go a talent such as Browning’s, but what’s beyond baffling is the fact that the dispute that led to Browning’s release from Winchester was over the design that would become the Browning Auto-5 shotgun – the very first semiautomatic shotgun ever produced. Browning had previously agreed to work for Winchester producing designs for a flat fee – for his revolutionary Auto-5, he wanted revolutionary payment in the form of royalties. Winchester did not accept this, and as a result the company went without Browning’s genius for 23 more years, during which time the greatest firearms designer ever to live invented the handguns that led to the timeless 1911, the Remington Model 8, FN Model 1910, the Remington Model 17 (which itself led to the Model 31, the Ithaca 37, and the Browning BPS) the M1917 machine gun and its air cooled follow on, the M1919, the BAR, the Remington Model 24, the M2 .50 caliber machine gun, the Superposed shotgun, and other firearms. In light of this, Winchester’s assessment that it “shall be perfectly able to get along without the Brownings, and shall probably be better off without them than with them… We do not believe they will get along as well without us as they did with us” can at best be met with protest. 

I have blamed the bean counters created from MBA schools and Detroit for their famous short term thinking, but after reading this, it seems as if the bean counters have been running businesses a lot longer than I ever suspected.