I usually throw the magazine into the recycling bag without even looking; however, this did catch my eye.
"Greetings from Gun Valley; Booming sales. Good-paying factory jobs. Tax breaks for employers. With little fanfare, firearms manufacturing is thriving in our blue, blue state" by Neil Swidey | Globe Staff, April 14, 2013
Right away you are getting a distorted stereotype about the state and region. Really makes one want to go ahead and read this agenda-pushing piece of shit.
How can a company like Savage Arms in Westfield, just off Exit 3 on the Mass. Pike, be thriving in high-cost unionized Massachusetts, when we were all led to believe manufacturing was firmly in New England’s past?
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Savage is probably the most dramatic example of what’s going on in “Gun Valley,” the swath of Western Massachusetts and Connecticut where industrial gun making in America began. Anchored by Colt in Hartford and Smith & Wesson in Springfield, the Connecticut River Valley remains home to dozens of firearms manufacturers and suppliers. Gun sales are soaring across the nation, with many manufacturers having posted record profits in 2012. And no matter where you fall on the gun debate, there’s no argument that this expansion has very real economic implications for a struggling region. There’s even a chance that the current boom could see guns reprise their role from two centuries ago, powering the growth of other high-skill manufacturing throughout the area.
Although California and Texas are home to more gun-related jobs, Connecticut and Massachusetts rank fourth and fifth in total economic output from this industry, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms trade association. And when it comes to average pay packages for those in the industry, Connecticut and Massachusetts occupy the No. 1 and No. 2 spots, at $71,123 and $65,386, boosted by all the executive salaries at those corporate headquarters. The fact that the foundation is based in Newtown, Connecticut, speaks to both the region’s historic connection to guns and the way the school massacre could reshape the future.
Oh, wow. I don't mean to be spitballing, but that event is looking more and more like an outright psy-op and hoax.
The carnage in Newtown came at the end of an assault rifle, and Connecticut expanded its ban on those weapons as part of its sweeping new gun measures passed earlier in April.
Then why was it found in the car and not by the dead body in the school?
Even though Savage produces rifles and shotguns for hunting and target shooting and does not make assault rifles or handguns, it is subject to the same winds blowing around the wider gun world....
Even as sales soar, only about one-third of US households have guns, down from about half in the 1970s, according to the 2012 General Social Survey, produced by an independent research center at the University of Chicago.
Now I'm really confused. I suppose it is whatever lie works at a given moment.
Most of us are at least two generations removed from the farm, and our meat arrives in rectangular plastic-wrapped packages.
And who knows what it really is these days.
On the other side, responsible gun owners have often let the loudest, most extreme voices do the talking. When National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre took to the airwaves amid the fresh tears of Newtown, he sounded not just insensitive but close to unhinged, refusing to cede an inch....
That's one interpretation.
Related: Sunday Globe Special: LaPierre's Legacy
Consider the source.
Economic development is an area that may provide even more fertile common ground. That’s why you find Governor Deval Patrick, a prominent gun control advocate, pushing through $6 million in tax breaks in 2010 for Smith & Wesson to move 225 jobs from New Hampshire to Springfield.
Oh, wow. So this state is going to be raising taxes and cutting services as they continue to toss hundreds of millions of dollars into corporate welfare programs? This of all industries, when the Mass. State Pension Fund is divesting from gun holdings.
It’s why you find Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno, an outspoken member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns — “Are you going to shoot a deer or shred a deer?” he once said in support of an assault rifle ban — securing another $600,000 in incentives for the company.
Springfield hypocrisy really $tinks.
And it’s why you find that Joe Lieberman during his time in the US Senate worked to advance tough gun control measures while lobbying behind the scenes to keep a certain Colt firearm off the Clinton-era list of banned assault weapons....
I'm not even going to comment except to say I am so glad he is out of the Senate. And for those who don't believe in rigged elections, isn't it odd that "Independent Joe" held the swing votes for control of the chamber and was the gatekeeper vote for filibusters?
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GUNS BUILT THE MIDDLE CLASS in Western Massachusetts. That’s the message Bruce Laurie, an emeritus history professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, is delivering to a group of schoolteachers who have packed into the basement of the Springfield Armory museum on this Wednesday evening in March. His talk is part of an effort to get more educators to think differently about the armory, a historic site run by the National Park Service. With fairly anemic numbers of visitors — fewer than 20,000 a year — the armory can be a tough sell, especially following Newtown. Many people have a hard time reconciling their dislike of guns with their support for what guns can provide, namely a good living for blue-collar workers.
There’s no getting around the fact that guns are at the center of the armory’s remarkable story. It begins in 1777, when George Washington approved it to be a major arsenal for the Revolutionary War. But the more important start date was 1794, when it became the new national armory for the manufacture of the US military’s muskets. The place went on to serve as a nexus of technological innovation. In the words of another historian, the armory became an “industrial beehive,” the forerunner to the Route 128 and Silicon Valley tech belts of the 20th century. (After selling the firearms company that bore his name, founder Arthur Savage went on to invent the radial tire.) In time, the armory spawned a loose network of small manufacturers and suppliers who shared knowledge and staff. Most of all, it created a highly skilled workforce across the valley.
Related: April Fool: The Great AmeriKan Workplace
In mill cities like Lowell, Lawrence, and Fall River, the work was textiles and the workers were low-skilled. That left their pay so meager that they needed their kids’ wages to keep their families afloat. In contrast, Springfield became “the City of Homes,” grand Victorian mansions for the well-to-do but, more important, huge tracts of single-family homes for the average — but highly skilled — workers.
Other industries, from automotive to aerospace, came to the region precisely because of all that skilled labor and those networks of manufacturers and suppliers. Rolls-Royce chose Springfield as the home for its American operation (and would have stayed longer had it not been for the Depression).
Skilled labor is one of the reasons so many gun manufacturers stayed even when other industries left for cheaper labor. But the region lost its beehive when the Pentagon shut down the armory in 1968 and turned over the Army’s gun making fully to the private sector. Yet that loose network of small manufacturers and suppliers remained, and it’s now benefiting greatly from the latest gun boom.
War was privatized way back then?
Bob Forrant worked as a machinist in Springfield before returning to school in the early 1990s. He’s now a UMass Lowell professor of history and regional economic development. He says that if these small companies in the valley are smart, they’ll use the surge in gun business to branch out into other advanced manufacturing work.
That’s exactly what’s happening at a company in Greenfield called VSS. In the early 1990s, when Steve Capshaw was studying political science at Boston College, his family’s company was stuck in the past. It was a dirty shop where workers did mind-numbing manual-labor machine work making the steel marking tools used to stamp brand names onto hand tools. Basically, they were waiting with dread for their jobs to disappear. The company did only about $500,000 in annual sales. When Capshaw took over the company, he bet big on the future, bringing in CNC machines and skilled workers to be able to handle advanced manufacturing jobs for the firearms and aerospace industries. Four years ago, VSS was doing only a few thousand dollars in business for Savage. In 2013, his immaculate shop is on pace to do $3 million with Savage alone. Capshaw, who is 41, says his customer base breaks down to 30 percent from Savage; 10 percent from other gun makers (mainly Smith & Wesson and Sturm, Ruger & Co. in New Hampshire); 30 percent from aerospace; and 30 percent from the old marking tool business. He expects VSS to do between $9 million and $10 million in business in 2013.
What’s more, he says he’s leaving a lot of money on the table because he can’t find enough skilled workers to hire, the result of the region’s long disinvestment in vocational and technical training. “I have an 18-year-old just out of technical high school making $55,000 a year,” Capshaw says. “A 27-year-old making $90,000.” He now has more than 40 employees and says the vast majority of them own their own homes. He provides full medical coverage — no deductible — and a full 401(k) match. Yet he’s pretty much stopped advertising job openings because there are so few qualified applicants.
Can always apply for an H1-B.
Over the summer, he interviewed three recent liberal arts grads from UMass Amherst, one who had $45,000 in college debt. “They were great kids,” Capshaw says, “but I couldn’t touch them because they had zero discernible skills.” He’d be willing to train them, he says, but his workers need to have IT skills and be mechanically inclined.
That's what the immigration bill is for.
A generation or two ago, even many liberal arts kids learned about engines by messing around under the hood of their cars. But that doesn’t happen anymore. So we have the crazy situation of runaway college debt, a persistently high unemployment rate, and a bunch of well-paying jobs with nobody qualified to fill them.
That sophistry is becoming damn offensive these days. And you American kids really got f***ed in all this. They have you focused on all the indoctrinating and inculcating politically-correct orthodoxy instead of teaching you skills. Go get a degree in gay or some worthless liberal arts (like me). Meanwhile, the immigration programs will bring in the smarter foreign workers for the "good jobs" you were supposed to get. The immigrants only do the jobs you lazy s***s won't do.
And who benefit$ at bottom when student loan debt is exempt from bankruptcy protection?
Why is the gun business in particular doing so well? Capshaw says the fears around President Obama are only part of the answer. A big driver is how automation and other technological innovations have dramatically lowered the costs of making guns.
So it takes less labor meaning less jobs?
When labor is a smaller piece of the cost structure, that allows companies in high-cost places like Massachusetts to be more competitive with cheap-labor areas.
But remember, average pay looks good because CEOs back at headquarters are making out like bandits.
That leads to more “reshoring,” producing items locally that used to be made overseas. That also allows gun makers to sell their products at much lower price points, which encourages existing gun owners and collectors to buy more of them....
I thought the nation was trying to restric.... never mind.
Massachusetts’s most prominent gun control advocate, John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, tells me he thinks the state was wrong to give Smith & Wesson tax breaks, since it makes assault rifles and handguns, even though he wouldn’t have a problem with them for a company like Savage. “Hunting rifles and sports rifles are not the problem,” he says. “Easily concealed handguns and military-style assault weapons capable of accepting large ammunition magazines are the problem.”
Of course, it's okay for government thugs to have them for drug raids or city tactical or whatever.
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