Yesterday, small arms manufacturing legend, Colt Manufacturing Company, has announced that it will cease manufacture of all modern sporting rifles including the popular AR-15 (for you anti-gun goobers, AR stands for Armalite, not Automatic Rifle). The reason: lack of future demand.

The gun maker Colt said on Thursday that it would effectively suspend production of sporting rifles, including the AR-15, for the civilian market but continue to manufacture rifles for government weapons contracts.

In a statement on its website, Colt emphasized that the company remained “committed to the Second Amendment,” but cited market conditions for its decision.

“Over the last few years, the market for modern sporting rifles has experienced significant excess manufacturing capacity,” Dennis Veilleux, the company’s chief executive, said in the statement. “Given this level of manufacturing capacity, we believe there is adequate supply for modern sporting rifles for the foreseeable future.”

It could very well be that Colt has some big brain business school grads who can predict customer demand and market saturation but that seems doubtful. If they did have those people, my iugess is that they’d have been hired by mega-corporations by now. FBI data doesn’t indicate that the market for firearms is saturated

The best information we have indicates that modern sporting rifles account for as many as half of all long gun sales.

Why you’d cease manufacture of an item that seems to be gaining popularity in anticipation of market saturation remains a mystery. Why not must “not expand” your existing operation, benefit from the current bull market in modern sporting rifles, and ramp down when the slowdown comes?

The obvious reason is that consumer demand, now or in the future, has nothing to do with it. Colt is simply engaging in that old behavior of appeasement which Winston Churchill observed: “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”

A week ago, I wrote this How The Democrats And Woke Corporate Fascists Will Team Up To Destroy The Second Amendment.

The central points are these. Business is assuming the role of cultural gatekeeper in our society and, because a lot of people on the right don’t believe the government should intervene to protect our constitutional rights and civil liberties, they now have the power to silence you and to put you out of business. If, at any time, the major credit cart companies decide that you can’t use a credit card to purchase a firearm or major banks put firearms dealers and manufacturers on a prohibited list, they will go out of business because you simply can’t run a retail business or manufacturing company on a cash basis. This is not scaremongering, this is simply looking at the business landscape and what has already happened.

Colt is sending a message that gunmakers can be “socially responsible.” By this message they allow banks and credit card companies to ratchet up the pressure on smaller manufacturers to follow suit. When the hammer drops on makers of modern sporting rifles, Colt will be out of the business and in the good graces of the commercial oligarchs who want to control what we say and think.

This will not work in the long run. Most mass shootings do not involve long guns. Once modern sporting rifle manufacturing is shut down the same oligarchs will come for makers of semiautomatic handguns. And then revolvers and other long guns. The writing is on the wall. Colt may think it has made a smart business decision, but it hasn’t. It has merely ensured its place in infamy when the history of how the Second Amendment was thrashed by woke corporations is written.

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