doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com WHAT A LOAD OF APCRAY

The American Rifleman's adolescent editor, Markie Keefe, the XXVIII has an article about the new shotguns, made in Turkey and sold by S & W.
What I'm calling " a load of apcray is this doubletalk: "Since Smith & Wesson has it's own(???) factories(plural ??) in Turkey producing break-action and semi-automatic shotguns, no American workers will be losing their jobs and no existing production will be sent offshore". What a wonderful bunch of guys! While this doublespeak may be technically true, they da-n sure aren't putting any Americans in new jobs either, are they? We couldn't make SxS and O/U guns to sell at their $2350 price and employ some Americans? Even a shop full of illegals would be better than sending the money to Turkey. That's my opinion. What's yours?

Jim,
I agree. They should call a spade a spade. If they want to invest in Turkey Okay say so, tell us it is there way of offering value to american shooters or some c--p like that.... but don't make up a story that no american workers will be displaced. I think we are adult enough to make our own decisions about who we by guns from.
I own foreign guns. I am okay with that..... but I don't appreciate S & W trying to hide the truth.... I know they have changed, but I still have a bad taste in my mouth over the turncoat years of S & W. This propaganda doesn't improve my opinion of them.

PS I finally got my RBL and believe me there is no Turkey Gun I have seen to date can compare with it. I have been shooting it too much to take time to post pictures, but it is beautifull. I'll do it soon.

Jerry

The noise on the street is that S&W just bought out Thompson Center too. Frankly, I don't really care where they make them.

I haven't bought a new-made gun in so many years, I can't recall when it last happened.
Brent

HA!! I was just telling some people about that story yesterday. They say it will be their own plant and not a Turkey gun plant. They kind of HEE-HAW around that subject. When they said it won't put Americans out of work I kept wondering......"Are Americans going to Turkey to work in the plant?" I think they are patting themselves on the back for not hiring cheap labor(illegals) to build them here in the States AND they have their own plant in Turkey that won't compete with the other guns made in the American plant. Either way, you have to wear a pair of boots to read the article. I guess everyone is trying to give the American double public a good inexpensive double. If anyone can do that and have it reliable, I have to give gunmakers some credit. Oh well, it's six of one and seven of the other.

Well at least he didn't repeat some of the technocrap from his last article on a new double gun. He described the ejectors on the gun as "unique in that the unfired shells are left in the gun while the fired shells are ejected" or something to that effect. The "selective double triggers" were another feature. I still can't figure out how they can make Turkish shotguns without doing any production offshore. I guess his "existing production" wording covers his butt. I guess if GM started producing every new car in Turkey, none in the U.S., as long as they were somewhat different from cars they used to make here, they "wouldn't be moving any existing production offshore."

Wondered if I was the only one that found that Rifleman article odiferous.

S&W has obviously been spreading some Christmas cheer amongst the gunwhoring writing community.

S&W's entry into the doublegun market is newsworthy, but O'Keefe's wearing short skirts and waving pom-poms - as if we wouldn't notice.

"Since Smith & Wesson has it's own(???) factories(plural ??) in Turkey producing break-action and semi-automatic shotguns, no American workers will be losing their jobs and no existing production will be sent offshore". Can't you see that line in the S&W talking points handed out between courses, as the waiter opens another bottle of wine?

Tom Gresham's similar S&W rah-rah isn't so annoying to me, he's a journalist-at-large not the Editor of the NRA magazine.

Well, we don't make many doubles in this country--period. Haven't for quite some time. And we're never likely to make many at that price point, unless maybe Ruger can get its Gold Label problems straightened out.

Better to have illegals making them in this country than Turks making them in an American-owned plant in Turkey? Not as far as I'm concerned. You guys follow the news on the ICE raids on the Swift meatpacking plants? One of those is just down the road from me, and not only did they scoop up over 1,000 illegals (total, in all the plants they raided), but they also discovered lots of them were into identity theft--which was one of the reasons behind the raids in the first place. Out my way, the meatpacking industry used to pay very good wages. They don't any more, because they found that immigrants--legal or otherwise--were willing to work for a whole lot less. So much for thousands of good paying, blue collar jobs. Would not want to see that happen to the sad remnants of the American gun industry.

Lots of issues at work here. How do we feel about buying Toyota and Nissan pickups, vs Ford/Chevy/Dodge, now that the former are being made in this country--by American workers, but foreign-owned companies?

To paraphrase the Clinton Administration: "It's the global economy, stupid!" We may not like it, but we pretty much have to live with it--although no one's holding a gun to anyone's head to buy a gun made in Turkey, whether marketed by an American company like S&W or a Czech outfit like CZ.

If Tony Galazan were willing to take on a full crew of El Salvadorians and train them to be apprentice machinists, no other U.S. company would ever sell another new double shotgun. I hope these Turks don't make him mad.

Personally, I don't care if it's an American or Turkish or Japanese executive that makes the money - I care who is actually doing the production. I'd much rather buy a Honda made in America, than a imported Chrysler. That said, I didn't have much of a choice buying a mini-van since they all seem to be made in Canada.

A friend of mine immigrated from Singapore. He tells me if you owned one gun or even one round of ammo, if you were lucky you got the death penalty, if not, you were thrown in prison for life. Japan was no different I guess. I have a hard time buying a Japanese Browning.

I guess it's a moot point for a lot of us guys though. If you are buying old guns, it really doesn't matter as far as manufacturing jobs. Although, I wonder how may of our guns, especially the pre-depression ones, were made by immigrants who never got around to signing the citizenship papers.