[monkmartinez]

Most of the "freedom group" make the same thing or operate in the same space. That is "tacti-cool" and people that want their names on lists for silencers, SBR's and other goodies they make.

I bet there was a crap-ton of consolidation that we didn't hear about. I bet a lot of people lost jobs in said consolidation.

[hga]

No, not really. Only one of their companies is inherently into NFA items, and H&R and Marlin, which bought them prior to it being bought by Freedom, and Dakota and Parker (!) aren't even into those sorts of guns. And Barnes only makes ammo and especially bullets. (Para USA makes double stack 1911s, which are technically "assault weapons" due to the increased magazine capacities, but based on an 106 year old design.) Only Advanced Armament Corporation (silencers), Bushmaster, DPMS, TAPCO (accessories) sell such items, and maybe you'd count Remington's hunting configured and camouflaged AR-10 and AR-15 pattern rifles, but that makes them the antithesis of "tacti-cool".

The loss of jobs from the consolidations are well known, plus overlaid with that is Remmington moving more and more stuff out of high cost, unionized, viciously anti-gun New York state, away from their original factory, where they were the first who's still in business to make arms in the US (or so they say, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_Arms and it's certainly a very old company and that complex is obviously very old).

ADDED: Without consolidation, it's entirely likely one or more of the traditional hunting arms companies Marlin, Dakota and/or Parker would have gone out of business like H&R did, there's much less Gun Culture 1.0 demand for such, and plenty of fine used specimens available.

Remington might have been less likely to do that if still under their original management, on the other hand, under Cerberus they were the first US ammo manufacturer to respond to the 2008 and on ammo shortage by buying new capital equipment to set up new production lines, which is not supposed to be the usual MO of private equity owned firms.

So my point is that these consolidated companies' products haven't, to my knowledge, suffered from the process, whereas a lot of us fear Rackspace's offerings will suffer (well, even more than they do today, one reason we can be pretty sure they put themselves up for sale).

ADDED: On the other hand, Zilkha & Co, which bought 85% of Colt, is raping it up, down, right and left, the very worst sort of this type of thing.