Colt has filed for bankruptcy.
I've been anticipating this for awhile.
As Bloomberg News reported, a vulture capital firm, Sciens Capital, has pretty much raped and pillaged Colt.
Colt has managed pretty much to fuck itself into the ground, even without the help of the vulture capitalists. They've hitched their wagon to government sales and ignored the consumer market. Colt doesn't make a civilian handgun design that didn't exist before the Great War. They gave up innovating eons ago. All of the other major gunmakers got into the CCW market, but other than the .380 Mustang, Colt ignored it.
If it wasn't for government sales, Colt would have dried up and blown away in the 1990s. and since they are run by vulture capitalists, who can't think long-term past the length of their dicks, the chances of Colt joining the ranks of modern gunmakers is almost nonexistent. For when it came to innovation when it came to handguns, Colt's just not there.
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8 comments:
They did try at least once to make a gun for the civilian market. Remember the Colt 2000 fiasco?
Al_in_Ottawa
Yep, and it eclipsed even the R51 as a fuckup.
Sorry to hear that ..........
I still own the 1959 Colt Huntsman that I learned to shoot with. Runs fine (and my 10 year -old Gold Cup does pretty well also.
I remember from childhood driving by the big building with the blue dome topped with the rearing horse.
Bear
Let's not forget Colt's other huge problem: A labor union driving up costs and slowing production. These days, unions are definitely company-killers. Colt should have moved to a right-to-work state long ago, but when the contracts are coming in and the money's flowing, a union is like a benign parasite that you can deal with. It's only when the green ink turns to red that companies realize how much a union costs them in profits and productivity, and by then it's often too late.
They had the full line of .380's, and the Pocket9, but they ran into patent problems and took them off the market. Kahr held the patents, IIRC.
Well, making guns in a right-to-work state didn't do much for Remington's efforts with the R51. And Smith & Wesson, just 45 minutes up I-91 in Massachusetts, seems to be doing OK, unionized workforce and all.
Businessmen whine about unions, but the reality is that the UAW workers for Chrysler and GM get paid less than the un-unionized workers at Toyota's Kentucky plant. Union workers today realize that they're competing with the world, and are doing their best to keep their employers competitive. This is the modern era. The 21st century. The 1950's are 60 years ago, already.
As for so-called "right to work", I view it as an infringement upon the 1st Amendment and am baffled that no labor union has ever taken it to court. If a company wishes to voluntarily sign a contract whereby they will only hire union workers, why is it any of the State's business? That's an interference of the 1st Amendment freedom of association, whereby workers and company managers/owners can choose who they associate with. When did it become the State's power to dictate who workers and company managers/owners can associate with? See NAACP v. Alabama, already.
But of course nobody's ever taken it to court, so ....
I quite liked my 1911 :-)
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