Remington, a gun manufacturer, is planning to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, hoping to reorganize and shed death debt [a typo I found & fixed this morning just before publishing]. To some extent, the election of President Trump is to blame, reports Forbes:
While the Remington name is unlikely to disappear, the company’s travails highlight the shifting fortunes of the firearms industry and its fraught position in the nation’s economic and political life. The company’s fortunes took a hit after the election of Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed “true friend” of the gun industry, because Hillary Clinton’s defeat erased fears among gun enthusiasts about losing access to weapons. Sales plummeted, and retailers stopped re-ordering as they found themselves stuffed with unsold inventory.
But this throw-off line from WaPo caught my eye:
But it’s not all gloom and doom for Remington or for the firearm business, in general. Richard Feldman, president of the Independent Firearm Owners Association, told Bloomberg that the company’s problems stemmed from normal “see-saws” in the industry.
“I suspect that if the Democrats make a resurgence this November,” Feldman said, “gun company stocks will come roaring back with them.”
If I were a gun manufacturer, would I be donating money to Republican campaigns – or Democrat’s campaigns?
It’s an example of colliding Sector optimization strategies, no? If you’re of a political mindset, the answer to the above question is straightforward – the party which best exemplifies what you think is good for the country is your probable pick in an ideal world where the candidates themselves are generally acceptable in terms of personal behavior and competency and that sort of thing. But when you’re the CEO of a company? Then, in all probability, your optimizations are focused on making money. In the current political climate, gun owners and enthusiasts spook like a herd of prey animals, as they’ve been fed a diet of gun rights absolutism and, not unjustified, the idea that the Democrats want to implement gun-control. Obama’s in office, the NRA sang the song of confiscation, and they all ran to the gun and ammo manufacturers and bought and bought and bought.
But with Trump in office, that song is a crow’s call. Recent examples of NRA entreaties to their members have been quite laughable.
So if you were a gun & ammo manufacturer, would you give to those who sooth their customers into somnolescence? Or those who cause the customer to soil themselves in their panic?
