Golden Poop Awards: Worst Gun Company Mistakes

 

Today we are looking at the Worst Mistakes made by a gun company

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Here we have gun companies who made disastrous mistakes

Bren Ten

The company set out with the lofty goal of building the ultimate combat pistol, they may have succeeded, but a few mistakes were made. One mistake was not making their own magazines, and many guns were shipped sans magazines, and some owners never got their magazines.

As it goes the guns didn't sell as well as expected and the magazine issue didn't help. A couple of plans to resurrect the gun failed as well.

The mistake was getting too far ahead of themselves. They should have made sure that magazines would be ready ahead of the guns. This is especially important when you are selling a gun for ten times what a typical combat semi-auto handgun sold for.

Whitney

The Whitney Arms Wolverine were built by a company called Hillson, which was Robert Hillberg, the designer and Johnson, the machinist. The guns were well made, very attractive and even sold pretty well, but a deal made with an unscrupulous distributor killed the company's profits and thus the company.

The gun was brought back once by Olympic Arms (with a polymer frame) and rumors are Samson Manufacturing is going to bring the original back.

The mistake was not having a plan to distribute the pistols in the beginning and then choosing a crook to do business with.

Ruger

This mistake was not by the company itself, but rather its founder Bill Ruger. While Bill was alive Ruger would not sell magazines with a capacity higher than 10 rounds to civilians, they would also not sell the Mini-14 factory folding stocks to civilians.

Bill Ruger stated publicly that magazine limits and waiting periods were a good idea. 

Many people boycotted Ruger products for these comments/policies. Once Bill Ruger Sr. passed on, those policies were thankfully reversed. Was Bill Ruger speaking his mind or losing it?

The mistake was Bill Ruger letting his personal or delusional feelings direct company business. 

USFA

United States Fire Arms Company was a producer of very good, if not the best made copies of the Colt Single Action Army. They even produced them in a rented space in the old Colt Hartford factory.

For some odd reason the owner decided to sink the resources of the company (including selling the old machines used to make the SAA clones) into a new .22 pistol called the "Zip Gun". The gun did not sell, not very many were made and USFA went out of business.

The mistake was selling the tooling and spending an inordinate amount of money on a gun no one wanted.

Smith & Wesson

I think the Wesson family made a mistake when they sold or allowed Bangor Punta to take over the company, everything started to go downhill after that.

In 1987 a British firm: Tomkins PLC bought S&W as an investment, not with the purpose of making better guns. 

In the year 2000 the Clinton Administration proposed new gun restrictions; Tomkins made a secret deal to be exempt from the restrictions in trade for putting a lock on their revolvers. A boycott followed and the company's stock price fell to 19 cents per share by the end of 2000. Six months later S&W was sold for 10% of what it should have been worth.

The mistake was making a deal with the devil to save your own skin....

44 Automag

The 44 Automag was a revolutionary design for several reasons, one it was all stainless steel, two it was a 44 magnum in an automatic. The problem was the cost, the gun cost so much to make they could not sell them for a price that provided a profit. It doesn't take a CPA to know that losing money is not a winning strategy. Despite internal efforts to convince the owner to build the guns from mild steel, the owner insisted the guns be made of expensive stainless.

The mistake was not redesigning the pistol in order to make it more economical to produce.

J. Kimball Arms

Magnum automatic handguns require a delayed action, thus ported gas is usually the best way to go.

John Kimball thought he had a better way, by making a chamber that would allow the brass to expand into a ring, the case would stick in the chamber and assuming the extractor held onto the case, would slow down the extraction and thus the rearward movement of the slide.

The idea failed, the ring would get fouled with debris from the combustion and the slides would be sent backwards at high velocity, the pin stopping the rearward movement often cracked or broke.