Category: All About Guns
Smith & Wesson CEO Mark Smith was fed up. He was running the largest firearms manufacturer in America, based in Springfield, Mass., where it had been making weapons since 1860, and yet state lawmakers were considering a bill to ban the manufacture of AR-15-style rifles for the civilian market. The proposed law would cripple Smith’s company. Sixty percent of Smith & Wesson’s revenue came from AR-15-style guns.
Feeling unwelcome in blue states, gun companies move to red ones© Charles Krupa/AP
So after years of flirting with the idea, Smith announced last September that Smith & Wesson was pulling up stakes and moving its headquarters from Massachusetts to Tennessee.
Deciding to leave was “extremely difficult,” Smith told investors, but “we feel that we have been left with no other alternative.”
At least 20 firearms, ammunition and gun accessory companies — including some of the industry’s biggest names, such as Beretta and Remington Arms — have moved headquarters or shifted production from traditionally Democratic blue states to Republican red ones over the past decade, relocating thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment amid the nation’s sharpening divide over guns. The companies were enticed by tax breaks and the promise of cheaper labor. But the biggest factor often was the push for stricter gun laws in many of the Democratic-leaning states.
“They’re going where they’re wanted,” said John Harris, a Nashville attorney and executive director of the Tennessee Firearms Association.
The result is a firearms industry that is increasingly rooted in the South and, to a lesser extent, the West, weakening ties to the Northeast that stretch back to the Revolutionary War. The dramatic shift illustrates the economic fallout from political polarization among the states, where laws and attitudes are increasingly diverging on hot-button cultural issues, including abortion rights. It also reveals a growing frustration among some left-leaning lawmakers with a homegrown industry that they see as unwilling to even discuss gun violence.
“This is where we part ways,” said Massachusetts state Rep. Bud Williams (D), whose district includes Smith & Wesson’s historic headquarters. “And I’ve been a big supporter of Smith & Wesson. But there’s too many mass shootings. I’m not going to be silent.”
Activists gather before the final mile of the 50 Miles More walk against gun violence, which ended with a rally at the Smith & Wesson Firearms factory on Aug. 26, 2018, in Springfield, Mass.© Scott Eisen/Getty Images
The departures have come in waves, often prompted by legislative reactions to high-profile mass shootings — first the 2012 school shooting in Newtown Conn., and then the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla. Some states run by Democrats tightened gun laws. Republican states often moved in the opposite direction, sometimes loosening gun restrictions in the wake of mass shootings, studies show.
New gun laws led Beretta USA to move its manufacturing operations from Maryland for Tennessee in 2014. Mossberg shipped its shotgun production from Connecticut to Texas that same year. That’s also when Magpul Industries, among the country’s largest producers of ammunition magazines, left Colorado for Texas and Wyoming.
In 2019, Stag Arms trumpeted its departure of Connecticut for Wyoming.
The next year, gunmaker Kimber Manufacturing fled New York for Alabama.
Last November, two months after Smith & Wesson’s farewell, the owner of Remington Arms, the nation’s oldest gunmaker, revealed it was moving its headquarters from Ilion, N.Y. to LaGrange, Ga., pledging to invest $100 million and hire 856 people in its new home.
“We are very excited to come to Georgia, a state that not only welcomes business but enthusiastically supports and welcomes companies in the firearms industry,” Ken D’Arcy, CEO of Roundhill Group, which owns RemArms, said in a statement. His company bought the Remington rifle brand and several others from Remington Outdoor in a bankruptcy sale.
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Republican lawmakers have encouraged gun companies to move and looked to lure them to their own states, viewing it as an opportunity to add jobs and burnish culture war credentials.
Last year, Oklahoma lawmakers launched a study of ways to attract gunmakers to the Sooner state. At the 2022 Shot Show, the firearms industry’s major annual trade show, governors from six states traveled to Las Vegas to sell their communities to the manufacturers of guns, ammunition and accessories. All of them were Republicans.
“These states are openly attracting the industry. Some of them have been very aggressive,” said Mark Oliva, spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group based — as it has been for decades — in Newtown, Conn.
The pitch isn’t only about being a safe haven for gun rights. State officials also dangle economic incentives.
Georgia offered $28 million in grants and tax breaks to Remington for its new headquarters. Wyoming gave at least $8 million in grants to Magpul for its relocation. And Smith & Wesson got a big break on property taxes, along with a $9 million grant. Smith & Wesson’s move is expected to boost the company’s earnings per share by about 10 cents a share annually, according to financial disclosures.
“Whatever motivation they have about guns, they’re also motivated by dollars,” Harris, of the Tennessee firearms group, said of the gun companies.
Remington, Smith & Wesson, Magpul, Stag Arms and Kimber did not respond to a request for comment. Beretta declined to comment. Tennessee economic development officials also declined to comment.
The firearms industry is not a huge part of the overall U.S. economy, but it carries symbolic weight. Guns sit at the center of some of the country’s fiercest cultural fights, such as the reach of constitutional rights and worries about crime and violence.
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These days, the firearms industry is growing rapidly, shaking off years of tepid sales during President Donald Trump’s term. (Gun sales tend to spike under Democratic presidents, when the potential for new gun laws seems greater.)
The frames of handguns sit on a rack at the Smith & Wesson factory in Springfield, Mass., in 2015. (Keith Bedford/The Boston Globe/Getty Images)© Keith Bedford/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
Americans bought an estimated 19.9 million firearms last year — the second most ever, right behind 2020′s pandemic-fueled record tally of nearly 23 million, according to Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting. Employment at firearms and ammunition companies jumped 28 percent from 2015 to 2021, totaling nearly 170,000 people nationwide, according to NSSF data.
The NSSF and the National Rifle Association have cheered on the gunmakers’ caravan of moving vans, attributing the trend to “anti-Second Amendment sentiment” and a search for friendlier states. An NRA journal called America’s First Freedom described the shift as, “Moving to Freer America.”
But most gunmakers are not abandoning blue states entirely.
Beretta USA, subsidiary of Italian gunmaker Beretta, moved 160 jobs from Prince George’s County’s Accokeek, Md., to Gallatin, Tenn., after Maryland lawmakers in 2014 banned dozens of assault-style weapons, including some made by Beretta.
“Why expand in a place where the people who built the gun couldn’t buy it?” Jeffrey Reh, general counsel for Beretta, said to The Washington Post while the state was debating the gun ban.
The bill passed, and Beretta moved. Its $45 million gun plant in Tennessee now employs about 300 people. And while Beretta’s production and research and development teams work there, the gunmaker’s executives and administrative staff — about 100 people — stayed in Maryland.
A recent search of online job ads showed Beretta had nine openings in Tennessee and five in Maryland.
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Smith & Wesson plans to keep 1,000 jobs in Massachusetts even after it moves 550 positions, plus another 200 jobs from around the country, and its headquarters to Tennessee, which is expected to be completed next year.
But the loss has been a blow to Springfield.
The city of 155,000 people is located in the Connecticut River Valley, a region once so stocked with firearms manufacturers that it was known as Gun Valley. Springfield was its unofficial capital, the place where George Washington decided to locate the nation’s first armory. Gun making has long been woven into the city’s story.
The Smith & Wesson headquarters in Springfield, Mass.© Karly Domb-Sadof/The Washington Post
Smith & Wesson was among the city’s top employers. It donated to local charities and helped sponsor the annual holiday lights display.
“It’s a pretty significant impact,” Timothy Sheehan, the city’s chief development officer, said of the gunmaker’s departure.
Despite the shared history, the relationship between the company and the city had grown strained recently.
The headquarters and its factory gates were the frequent staging ground for protests. Students and religious groups have picketed outside several times since the 2018 Parkland shooting, when a gunman used a Smith & Wesson AR-15-style rifle to kill 17 students and staff.
Last year, the father of a teen killed in that shooting designed a highway billboard that overlooked the firearms plant. It carried the message: “I can’t turn 21 and enjoy my first legal beer because a Florida teen was allowed to get his first legal AR-15.”
Smith & Wesson has responding by digging in and balking at the suggestion it shares responsibility for how its guns are used. This summer, Smith, the chief executive, refused to join executives from other weapons makers when they testified before a House Oversight Committee looking into the firearms industry. He then issued a statement blaming politicians for gun-related crimes and accused them of trying to shift culpability.
The company used to be more willing to talk about ways it could help reduce gun violence.
In 2000, a year after the school mass shooting in Columbine, Colo., President Bill Clinton’s White House and Smith & Wesson announced a legal settlement that included the gunmaker agreeing to install child-safe triggers and to ban sales to gun dealers with checkered pasts. Other gunmakers considered joining the deal. But facing intense pressure from the NRA and the gun industry, Smith & Wesson eventually backed away from the deal. Its chief executive resigned.
The deal was scrapped.
Massachusetts went on to pass some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Long before the gunmaker’s move to Tennessee, it was illegal for Smith & Wesson to sell its AR-15-style rifles to civilians in its home state.
Last year’s proposed state bill would’ve gone even further and outlawed the manufacture of those rifles.
Sheehan, the city’s chief development officer, said he understood the difficult position that the company was in.
“I can also understand the point — the social point — that the legislation was driving at,” Sheehan said.
“But, in my mind,” he said, “you also need to weigh that with the economic impact.”
The bill didn’t pass.
But Smith & Wesson is not coming back.
Williams, the Springfield representative, was among the bill’s co-sponsors.
He knew what it could do to a company in his own backyard.
And he’d once been a big supporter of Smith & Wesson. It was the kind of place where a local kid could land a good job right out of high school and stay a lifetime. As a city councilman, he’d helped push for the company to get property tax cuts. He’d encouraged police departments to buy Smith & Wesson weapons.
But Williams increasingly took note of the toll of gun violence. It wasn’t just the mass shootings. There were the many smaller shootings that seemed to barely make the news.
Smith & Wesson refused to talk about any of it, he said.
He’d seen enough. It was too much. It didn’t matter anymore to him that this was a hometown company.
“I just felt that with all these shootings,” Williams said, “at some point it’s time to put lives over profit.”
Smith & Wesson is expected to open its headquarters down South next year.
Its new home is in a Tennessee county that a couple of years ago declared itself a Second Amendment “sanctuary,” where local leaders vowed to fight against gun control.
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Uberti Schofield & Black Powder?
Elizabeth McHutcheson was a hearty woman of Scottish descent cursed with a terminal case of wanderlust. She married a ship’s captain named Francis Sinclair and eventually produced six children. Elizabeth moved her family to New Zealand and established a farm. However, her husband and eldest son were later lost at sea along with most of the family’s possessions.
Down but not out, Elizabeth relocated to Canada and then Hawaii with the remains of her family. Once settled in she bought the Hawaiian island of Ni’ihau for $10,000. Ten grand was an astronomical sum in 1864, but it turned out to be a fairly prescient investment.
Ni’ihau is the furthest West and second smallest of the primary Hawaiian Islands. Ownership of the island passed down through the family until 1941 when Elizabeth’s great-grandson Aylmer Robinson maintained possession. Aylmer was a Harvard graduate who spoke fluent Hawaiian. He was a benevolent landlord who lived on nearby Kaua’i. His island was accessible by permission only which was seldom granted. Robinson made weekly visits by boat to check on the native islanders who held him in high esteem.
In 1941 one hundred thirty-six native islanders called Ni’ihau home. Among them were three individuals with Japanese ancestry. Aylmer Robinson administered his idyllic little kingdom free from government interference.
In the buildup to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese naval planners mistakenly assessed Ni’ihau as uninhabited. As a result, they briefed their aviators to divert to Ni’ihau in the event of battle damage preventing return to the carriers. The plan was for downed aircrew to survive on the island until they could be retrieved via submarine.
The Plot Thickens
On the morning of December 7, 1941, Airman First Class Shigenori Nishikaichi launched his A6M2 Zero fighter B11-120 from the carrier Hiryu as part of the second wave. Unlike the first attack that achieved complete tactical and strategic surprise, the second element flew into a hornet’s nest. American fighter resistance was negligible, but the warships anchored at Pearl bristled with antiaircraft guns. .50-caliber, 20mm, 40mm, and 5-inch antiaircraft weapons filled the sky with steel.
Nishikaichi’s Zero was badly damaged during a strafing run on Wheeler Field and limped away trailing smoke. Realizing that there was no way his nimble Zero was going to make it home, Nishikaichi diverted for Ni’ihau. Crash-landing his crippled fighter in a field near a local named Hawila Kaleohano, Nishikaichi was briefly dazed but otherwise unhurt.
The Chemical Formula for Awkward
The arrival of Nishikaichi’s Zero was the biggest event on Ni’ihau in collective memory, and the islanders all came out to gawk. They knew that the relationship between the United States and the Empire of Japan was strained. However, the Hawaiians are a naturally friendly people. Hawila Kaleohano relieved the young aviator of his handgun and personal documents, and the rest of the islanders threw the lad a party.
Only the three islanders with a Japanese nexus spoke Japanese, and the rest of the Ni’ihau inhabitants were unable to communicate with their new guest. For ease of explanation we will refer to these three individuals by their first names—Ishimatsu, Yoshio, and Irene. However, the Japanese pilot was becoming ever more agitated about the loss of his maps, weapon, and mission directives.
The island’s residents caught a report of the attack on a battery-powered radio and confronted the Japanese pilot. Their intent was to send him back with Mr. Robinson when he arrived on his next scheduled visit. Their guest now effectively became their prisoner.
Aylmer Robinson failed to arrive on his appointed day, and this unsettled the islanders. Robinson was typically quite punctual. However, the military had banned boat traffic, so Ni’ihau was effectively isolated.
Petty Officer Nishikaichi was remanded to the home of Yoshio and Irene, two of the islanders with Japanese connections, to be overseen by four volunteer guards. Unbeknownst to the rest of the island’s inhabitants, Yoshio and his wife were re-evaluating their loyalties. All the while the pilot’s classified documents remained in the possession of Hawila Kaleohano, the man who had originally encountered the pilot.
A Cold War Goes Hot
These people were not soldiers, and three of the four guards eventually wandered off. Seeing their opportunity Irene turned her phonograph up to cover the sounds of the ensuing struggle, while her husband and the pilot attacked the remaining guard. In short order the two had the man secured in a warehouse and had retrieved Nishikaichi’s pistol as well as a shotgun.
The two men then proceeded to Kaleohano’s home in search of the attack plans. They arrived during the man’s quality time, so he was serendipitously hidden unseen in his outhouse. When the moment was right Kaleohano fled the privy and ran for his life, shotgun blasts chasing him down the trail. Thusly alerted the islanders retreated to caves, thickets, and distant beaches, unable to believe that these people with whom they had shared the island were now actively firing upon their friend and neighbor.
The pilot and his compatriot then stripped a 7.7mm machinegun and ammo from the plane, unsuccessfully attempted to use the radio to contact the Japanese fleet, and set the Zero alight. They then went to Kaleohano’s home and burned it to the ground in a further effort to destroy Nishikaichi’s classified documents.
It Gets Worse…
Kaleohano, his home conflagrated, kept the Japanese military documents in his possession and took to a boat to row to the nearest nearby island. Not realizing he was gone, Nishikaichi and Toshio press-ganged a local couple named Ben Kanahale and his wife Ella into the hunt for Kaleohano. The pair took Ella hostage to motivate her husband to stay on task.
Ben wasted a little time pretended to search and returned to check on his wife. When Nishikaichi realized he was being deceived he pulled his pistol and threatened to kill everyone in the village. At this provocation Ben Kanahale went full Chuck Norris on the man.
The Gun
For reasons you will find out momentarily, the exact model of the handgun has been lost to history. However, the three most likely candidates are the 8mm Type 14 or Type 94 autoloaders or the Type 26 revolver. Balance of probability suggests that at the beginning of the war in the hands of an elite Japanese Naval Aviator his handgun was likely a Type 14 Nambu.
The Type 14 is a recoil-operated, locked-breech, semiautomatic handgun whose original mechanism dates back to the late 19th century. LTG Kijiro Nambu designed the weapon along with an array of other Japanese military arms. The locked-breech mechanism favors and was likely inspired by that of the Glisenti Model 1910.
The Type 14 debuted in 1925 and fires the relatively anemic bottlenecked 8x22mm round common to all Japanese wartime autoloading handguns. Considerably less powerful than the 7.62x25mm, 9mm Parabellum, and .45ACP rounds used by other combatant nations, the 8mm Nambu was marginal at best. The Type 14 fed from an 8-round box magazine, sported a 4.6-inch barrel and weighed about 2 pounds. About 400,000 copies were produced.
Japanese officers were expected to buy their own handguns, and the Type 14 was a popular souvenir of combat in the Pacific. As the war progressed and B29 attacks strangled the home islands the quality of these weapons declined precipitously. Bill Ruger bought a Type 14 from a returning Marine in 1945 and used it as a basis for his Ruger Standard pistol that eventually morphed into the Mk I, II, III, and IV .22 handguns so common today.
The Climax
Seeing an opportunity, Ben Kanahele and his wife Ella jumped the distracted Japanese pilot and his turncoat buddy. Ella grabbed his gun arm, but Yoshio Hamada peeled her off. Nishikaichi then shot Ben three times, striking him in the upper leg, groin, and abdomen. This turned out to be a grave mistake.
Kanahele was a sheep farmer and a powerful man. Despite his grievous injuries he took hold of the Japanese pilot, lifted him bodily, and threw him headlong into a stone wall. Ben and Ella then fell upon the dazed Japanese aviator with a vengeance. Ella smashed his head with a rock, and Ben cut the man’s throat with his hunting knife. Overcome by events, Nishikaichi’s ally Yoshio shot himself in the head with the shotgun.
Ella Kanahele snatched up the shotgun and pistol and ran for help. Along the way she inadvertently dropped the weapons. The pistol was never recovered, but the shotgun washed up in a flood some five years later.
Yoshio’s widow spent the next 31 months in prison and was released in June of 1944 despite never being formally charged with a crime. Ben Kanahele was evacuated to a nearby island with a hospital and ultimately recovered, being awarded the Medal for Merit and Purple Heart for killing the Japanese pilot in close combat. The remains of Nishikaichi’s Zero are on display at the Pacific Aviation Museum at Pearl Harbor today.
