This is not an uncommon story for firearm manufacturers unfortunately. Tooling costs are high, sales hard to predict, and designs can fail easily. Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons has done a lot of videos on this topic.
Like there's a lot of discussion about usage and practicality among gun enthusiasts, but when they buy their 3rd or 6th gun ... I suspect the decisions are more about difficult to predict things and whims.
It is a strange market.
Historical examples:
* The Firearm Owners Protection Act banned machineguns manufactured before 1986.
* The Federal Assault Weapons Ban banned certain semi-automatic weapons excluding those manufactured before 1994.
Firearm hobbyists need decade-plus forward thinking predictions. What's today legal is a felony tomorrow, unless steps are taken now.
This makes it a volatile guessing game, even more than other hazardous hobbies (cars, aircraft, martial arts, motorcycles, etc.).
You see popular revolvers selling well... nobody is buying those based on the law.
There were lengthy and severe shortage of small arms and ammunition following both Obama's election and the Sandy Hook shooting, especially .22 caliber ammunition. [1]
I don't think .22 ammunition is on the chopping block, but there's a general positive feedback loop, like a bank rush.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%9313_United_States_...
Perhaps related to this scam, I don't remember any company other than Remington building out a major increase in capacity, that article mentions their $32 million plant expansion. Companies were reluctant since they didn't know when demand and supply would get back in sync, I would also wonder if smokeless powder capacity was a factor, there aren't very many companies that make it.
Places out east (NY, NJ) have extremely low limits for capacity, both in effect and proposed. When ammunition capacity is reduced, there is an incentive to go for a (typically) more reliable revolver. Many people would rather have say a 7-shot 357 S&W wheelgun vs a 9-round (maximum) semi-auto magazine.
I ankle-carried a .357 snub for most of my life, and it literally weighed less than the 5 rounds that it held.
In case anyone isn't reading between the lines:
The chief advantage of a more complicated, less reliable, more expensive semi-auto handgun is its larger capacity in a smaller profile. A semi-auto packs rounds tightly together rather than having an effective chamber around each one.
But if you don't actually get more rounds, might as well opt for a revolver like the parent.
Why would the price matter?
>You build something, people want it, pay money.
>Competition happens and you need to change or die
Don't change quick enough, you are dead. Big companies can't change quickly, but they can throw money at problems. Death of a company is inevitable.
I grew up in NYC and moved to a country town when I was 10-11 years old. Guns were forbidden things that only cops and soldiers should have from our family's POV -- it was really awkward.
But the sporting, enthusiast and security drivers of demand for firearms is real and legitimate, and folks in that culture are equally confused about the point of view. My parent's neighbor had a bunch of guns -- probably like 20. Some were antique, he had shotguns for deer, trap/skeet, birds, rifles for hunting and target shooting and cheap ammo guns for plinking and practice. Shooting sports were family activities that were positive things. I was into baseball, my neighbor was into shooting and archery.
Unfortunately, the toxic politics around the issue encourage extreme positions and ultimate reduce real and nuanced issues into binary positions that encourage bad behavior. It doesn't help that extreme positions make money for different stakeholders.
From my experience, that's sort of low. I never thought my neighbors had so many guns, until I started spending time at the shooting range. A common site is a trunk packed to the gills with firearms. The "gun guys" buy them like the "sneaker guys" buy Nikes. They usually won't talk about it, unless you express interest or go shooting with them.
It's actually a really neat collection, but I wince at how much it had to cost and how much use he actually gets out of them.
You don't have to shoot a gun to appreciate it. My great grandfather's service revolver? It's a link to the past, not a range toy.
No, there's plenty of demand for guns. Remington's just lost their former reputation.
This is pretty much it. Sad, considering I own a fine bolt-action paper puncher from Remington in .223. But it's no more complex than what you pointed out.
I agree free market (with certain safeguards) is usually the best path for a society to sustain itself and prosper.
But I feel private equity firms are definitely not good for a free market to sustain itself. And yet they and their lobbyists will insist free market is the best for our society, use that line to prevent any regulations over what they do.
We don't have any pity for auto manufacturers who make garbage and lose badly. Why would anyone have pity for gun manufacturers who do the same?
Need or want? Like any other hobby your limit is your budget.
There are guns that exist for no other reason than the lulz ("hundred dolla problem solva" I'm looking at you). Historically inclined individuals could spend a fortune just collecting variants of one specific niche of firearms from a particular nation and time period.
The old estimates are bad, for example, 275 million new in to the market guns were counted by a system the BATFE introduced in 1999 for high volume manufacturers, importers and wholesalers, a total of 66 FFLs, that no academic had previously used in an estimate.
They also make great investments as a quality firearm holds it worth and often increases in value.
"The correct number of $ITEM to own is n+1, where n is the number you own now."
$ITEM can be "mountain bikes", "guitars", "road bikes", "motorcycles", "guns" or pretty much anything.
So while the "average" owner might have 1-3 guns (in this case), and the average "fanatic" might have 5-10, you have enough obsessives to throw things off.
(Carefully does not look at bookshelf with literal hundreds of RPGs)
/sigh
I saw several estimates that agree on average somewhere between 8 and 10.
A couple of bolt action rifles for hunting, rimfire for plinking with kids, a pump-action shotgun stashed somewhere for home defense, a pistol to carry concealed, another pistol as backup, grandpa's revolver that is now a decoration, and three old rifles in various state of decay at the back of the safe that everyone forgot about - those are all very typical.
It used to be that almost every American household had someone who was a competent shooter, an good cook, a competent musician, a decent craftsperson or repair person of some kind. Times have changed.
From what I have seen, only having 1 gun is more common in the African American community and in some parts of rural America.
I'm not anti-gun by a long shot (no pun intended), but pictures I have seen of some of these "collections" are staggering (like, enough guns and ammo to arm a small platoon of people).
In many cases they aren't displayed as a collection, but closer to a weapons cache in waiting...for what kind of situation I don't know.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2019/04/30/violent-uprising...
I can count on one hand the number of people I know who own a home but don't own a firearm.
I grew up in an affluent suburb of Massachusetts, where guns were really uncommon.
I got stationed in Yuma, Arizona, where pretty much everyone owned guns.
Here in a suburb of Portland, OR, it's somewhere in the middle. Oregon is an interesting state.