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Comment by csunbird | Hacker News Reader

I do not know much about how good Colt is doing, but isn't 220mil plus 18mil in stocks a bit cheap?

The billion dollar valuations of silicon valley startups may cloud your judgement a bit.

220 mil is a lot. Most companies won't be worth this much.

Except for the US, guns are mostly sold to governments (policy, military) so the gun market isn't that large, and there is lots of competition.

But still, that means several of those highly-valued SV companies could afford to buy most gunmakers in existence...

Apple could just have bought the music industry when they launched iTunes. The value, and in some cases the profit, of tech companies are weird outliers in the business world.

I'm now trying to picture what an Apple handgun would look like

https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/

They would change the magazine design every few years and it would only fire Apple ammunition.

I would be a big fan of planned obsolescence for guns along with proprietary, not easily available ammo, actually.

Unfortunately ammo is easy to make. Many people make their own to varying degrees of complexity.

Changed the charging cable once, after 9 years. People still bring that up. Lightning has been around for 9 years already.

(Sorry if the changed magasine design was about something else.)

Incorrect: They also changed the 30pin standard while keeping it 30pin. Many people found that they could not charge or play music with their new iDevice when plugging it in to a factory-wired (and non-removable) 30pin cable in their car.

There have also been multiple iOS updates that block 3rd party chargers through software even though those chargers use the lightning connector.

Even if detachable magazines were legal (which it now looks like they soon will not be, with the possible exception of grip magazines in pistols), an Apple firearm won't include one. If the gun ever jams you have to take it to a Genius Bar to get it unjammed. Because it features Touch ID, it will be the only firearm to comply with Biden's proposed smart gun requirement at the time the requirement passes, and thus the only legal gun in America until other manufacturers follow suit -- but a gunOS mandatory security update causes the gun to squirt water instead of firing ammunition.

An iGun will only fire specially made square iBullets with DRM chips

Well, it can only shoot at other iGun owner, so that kinda limits it’s usefulness.

> square bullets

But only at the Turks!

Thanks - I had a good Puckle at that one.

Wait, really? I had to look that up. From their share price chart, get AAPL as being ~0.33/share then vs ~133 now and market cap $2.2T, which backs out to ~$5-6 billion in mid-2001.

I can't easily find the valuation of Sony BMG or EMI at the time.

Yup. The largest ones could afford to buy a mid-size country. (AMZN revenue = $386B, AAPL revenue = $274B, GOOG revenue = $182B, Norway GDP = $366B, Vietnam GDP = $340B, Chile GDP = $245B).

Note also that SpaceX has more accurate ballistic missiles than the U.S. and Russia (PeaceKeeper CEP = 40M, while SpaceX routinely lands rockets upright within a ~10M radius on a drone ship), and Google has more data than the CIA & NSA (why else did the NSA try to wiretap them?). The microchip revolution put enormous capabilities in the hands of those organizations that know how to code effectively, such that Silicon Valley startups can often do things that were the sole province of national governments for decades.

Surely one would expect to pay at least a few times annual revenue for a country?

Not if you use a community adjusted ebitda valuation.

That's revenue <=> GDP, and roughly earnings <=> tax revenues. I believe those are equivalent comparisons: revenue and GDP both include all internal transactions, while earnings and tax revenue reflect what's available for management/government to spend at their discretion.

If a tech company were buying the country, market cap would be the appropriate metric, and market caps for those tech companies are in the $2T range, more than enough to pay a few times annual GDP.

Agreed with the sentiment that modern companies are capable, but disagreed on the rocket comparison -- the comparison is difficult at best.

One is travelling at tremendous speed (Mach 5 or something?) and has milliseconds for course-corrections, the aspires to come to a gentle halt and can close some feedback loops over and over again for thousands of milliseconds.

Edit: If you wish to make a weapons comparison, one might note that SpaceX can launch the mother of all MIRVs over and over again. The lower cost-to-orbit changes the economic calculus of rods-from-god, opening a possibility of a conventional-weapons bombardment from the other side of the planet for the first time.

> One is travelling at tremendous speed (Mach 5 or something?)

Much higher, about mach 20 to 25. They are moving seriously fast.

Oh, you're right -- it has been ages since I've read about things like ABM intercept problems.

That does a great job of placing the accuracy problem in context: That's ~7 km/second, or perhaps a mile per eyeblink.

ICBM's also can't use GPS or equivalent navigation satellites, as those will likely be the first to be taken out in a nuclear exchange. They use inertial guidance (https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30254/this-isnt-a-sci-... ) maybe together with some star navigation system for mid-course guidance.

An ICBM hitting a target purely on internal guidance is an entirely different level of problem from what SpaceX is doing with cooperative positioning systems at the target. Also keep in mind that the "wikipedia numbers" for classified weapons systems are usually "at least" numbers, not exact.

It's not at all clear who has more data between GOOG and NSA. Both don't exactly declare the numbers, but it is known that in several recent years NSA has been the largest single buyer of spinning disks in the world.

Tech companies have indeed become powerful, but let's not get hyperbolic. The world hasn't become shadowrun quite yet.

"in several recent years NSA has been the largest single buyer of spinning disks in the world."

The rest of the world moved to SSDs in ~2010. Google's been storing the whole web on flash since then. (I guess if you're archiving for slow-speed retrieval disks are still useful, but if that's your use-case, why wouldn't you use tape?)

> why wouldn't you use tape

Because there are many orders of latency magnitude between spinning rust and tape.

We still use a lot of spinning disk for precisely this reason - you get roughly 5x the online capacity for the same cost and automation does not whine about wanting the new shiny.

That was why I mentioned SSDs - there are orders of latency magnitude between SSDs and spinning disk.

I guess it fits the NSA's use-case though, where they have ~thousands of analysts running complex queries but no external users, rather than ~billions of external users running well-defined queries.

I left the storage industry about 5 years ago, but at least as of then the big cloud providers were still buying lots of spinning rust and showed no signs of stopping. These companies store a lot of long tail data which needs to be available but doesn't need super low latency access. It's still much more economical to store such data on disks than in flash.

I wasn't really trying to get into some sort of debate about storage technologies, just illustrating that the NSA does have a whole lot of data.

Spinning disk is cost competitive with tape robots these days, while offering much better access performance. There's a few different vendors that supply this sort of setup, or you can build your own backblaze style. The core idea is you build storage servers that can hold more disks than can be active at any given moment. Powering up a drive and doing a seek is a lot faster than a tape robot.

I’ve worked on infrastructure (design) engineering teams at a very large company that still does their own datacenters. I can confirm that spinners are still very much in use and are not used for archival purposes - that’s what tapes are designed and used for.

Let's get hypergoooooolic! What? I've been alone in a room coding for three days.

Yeah, they could, but why would they? There are lots of less controversial fields to invest in...

Companies that attack and manipulate 1A to their advantage in every place they hold power have no reason to support 2A, that's definitely true.

If they have a liquidation event, or just do a stock trade? IDK... Valuation !== Value

Yes if they buy with stock, and if the stock doesn't tank when they announce their intentions. So, no.

It stands to reason that if Colt's owners could have gotten a significantly better deal they probably would have.

In particular, Colt may have substantial liabilities, making the cost of the purchase to CZG larger than the amount of money that changed hands.

I think FN has a lot of the US military contracts now, so it that might help explain why

But FN is a Belgian gun manufacturer, how does this relate to CZG from the Czech Republic?

Colt used to sell many rifles to the US military. They lost that business to FN. And with that they lost a lot of value.

As pointed out downthread, Colt lost military contracts to FN, decreasing stock value

That makes sense, thanks for the clarification.

How does FN enter here? I thought they're owned by the Belgian government?

reduced valuation of Colt

The company was recently bankrupt.

Oh, that explains a lot! Even though I am not a gun enthusiast, I have heard of their name, they are quite famous.

Their bankruptcy several years ago kept them alive but didn’t really solve their problems. They’re little more than a brand (not an entirely positive one) and manufacturing capacity. Their revenue is offset by their expenses.

> Their revenue is offset by their expenses.

Sounds like me.

I'd think so given the number of Government Contracts. Looks like this includes things like Colt Canada which is the provider of small arms to the armed forces. C7, C8 etc.

Colt has basically been milking the 1911 and AR-15/M-16 for decades. And they lost the M-4 contract to FN a while ago, so they have very little going for them but the name.

I'd argue it's still a little high, most of these companies are on the wane.

Guns in the US are near saturation from a market perspective and regulatory changes will eventually kick the floor out. Time to cash out... It's like when Phillip Morris bought Kraft and General Foods in the 80s to spin them off later when tobacco regulation came.

Monthly gun sales have about tripled since 2000, and we had a lot of guns even back then: https://www.google.com/search?q=gun+sales+per+year&client=sa...

As to regulatory changes: support for a handgun ban is the lowest its been since Gallup started tracking the statistic in 1959: https://news.gallup.com/poll/150341/record-low-favor-handgun.... It's just 26% today, versus 60% in 1959.

Unlike with tobacco, there's no big scientific study or educational campaign that's going to drop. Guns are a well-ventilated issue.

Like with tobacco, big studies have been suppressed. Guns are far from a well-ventilated issue, they're just well-entrenched.

The Dickey amendment got clarified in 2018, and the first earmarks for research were for FY2020 - so, I'd say we wait with those proclamations a few more years.

What difference are those studies going to make? If Columbia University in the City of New York discovers you can use guns to kill people, are voters suddenly going to go "oh, well then!"

That's clearly not the kind of research that's going to be done.

Funding of gun studies means we can make arguments backed up by data instead of partisan bickering. Calls to arm teachers in classrooms or mandate trigger locks on guns have real world effects, and both sides think they're right about it. Funding for studies of specific actions and policies help us as a society make more informed decisions.

More info: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5993411/

You will find that many of us gun rights supporters don't care what data comes out. I don't support 2a because fewer than n people die per year from guns.

Facts often drive behavior and understanding.

Examples:

- Are there correlations between outcomes and specific brands, configurations, or other attributes of firearm?

- Are there correlations between sales at specific outlets and outcomes?

- Is age and/or experience correlated with negative outcomes?

The assumption is that studying this would negatively impact gun ownership. I don't think that's true. Consider that anti-gun rhetoric over the .50 Barrett rifle. You may find that it's really a collector's item that isn't associated with crime. I'm sure there are many examples similar to this, that are blocked by black and white opinion on the matter, fueled by mutual ignorance.

The Dickey Amendment didn't ban any studies or doing research, it banned the CDC from advocating gun control policies at a time when the administration was pushing it to use its authority/reputation to do so. It would be like me saying you can do all the research you want on teenage pregnancy and the like, but we're not funding your department to do political advocacy campaigns for abstinence. Stick to the science.

...and yet, where are these publicly funded studies on gun violence since? It's a ban in fact, if not a ban in law.

Here's a CDC-funded study on gun violence from 2013:

https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/1

You've been repeatedly and blatantly lied to by the media and politicians about the CDC being "banned" from researching gun violence. The ban was on the use of public funds to advocate for specific gun laws/policies, not on research into the subject itself.

And covid has made the mass shooting argument irrelevant. It's killed about ten times as many americans. The US can sustain 10k gun casualties a year without moving the politics at all.

Until it comes to the Capitol, I suppose.

Even smartphone demand slows down. And that's a device with daily utility with a 2-5 year life.

Seriously, I'm coming at this from a perspective of a country boy who went shooting 3-4 times a month as a teen, and earned a bounty for shooting pigeons on a farm. How much more demand can be filled for more guns the mostly sit around and gather dust? It's a market driven by ignorance and fear -- folks are treating these things as investments for a doomsday that will never come.

I'm not an anti-gun guy... I own two shotguns, a hunting rifle and a .22. What's the point of adding more? Pistols, AR-15 fetishization, etc aren't for me. What I have will probably be in great shape beyond my lifetime; if anything I might trade up if I got into skeet again.

Say you are right and no regulatory changes take place.... you're still going to have a cohort of old people who hit the gun hoarding profile start to die off and flood the secondary market with estate sales. My parents have a neighbor in the country that probably has >250 rifles, and there are way more people like that than the WW2/Korea generation that has mostly left us. What's the collector value of yet another AR-15 clone?

Population continues to grow, and there are many Americans who don't own guns who represent a big market. Many have purchased their first in the past year. And yes, lots of people like collecting a shooting a wide variety of guns. Most of then do it for reasons other than or in addition to prepping. The new firearms market is not going to die; the idea that it will is fudd nonsense.

The point is that manufacturers aren't really producing a wide variety of guns. I wouldn't be surprised if 3/4 of new guns in the country are black polymer-and-aluminum AR-15s or black polymer-framed tilting-barrel striker fired pistols.

There's a reason the tilting barrel polymer fired pistol is basically universal.

Gun ownership in the US has gone down over the past ~30-40 years, but the number of guns per capita has gone up, which indicates that fewer people are buying guns but that those who do are buying more guns than they used to.

Ownership estimates are based on survey data, not registration data. Gun owners are far, far less likely to be honest about ownership with some rando survey taker than they were 40 years ago.

The immigrant population particularly. There’s a lot of suppressed interest overseas that gets exercised upon arrival, whether visiting or immigrating.

> Even smartphone demand slows down. And that's a device with daily utility with a 2-5 year life.

How many people do you know who collect smartphones? Also, waaaaaay more smartphones are sold per year in the US than guns (it's roughly two orders of magnitude difference), so if that represents some kind of ceiling, then it's a very high one that guns are nowhere near.

Although I find firearms a bit scary in practice, I've been around enough gun nuts to get where they're coming from, and also been around to hear voices from different countries with different rules...and I agree that there is a "gun pollution" problem here that deserves a different framing from the form that has been around in the US my whole life.

If you have two guns, it's simple to keep them maintained, cleared and secured when not in use. If you have 250 guns, you are extremely likely to lose track of them. And when you lose track, accidents happen. That's nothing to do with crime or responsibility or freedoms or the design of the gun - it's there in the statistics that country by country, there are more accidential gun deaths when there are more guns, and bringing our market to saturation is not serving anyone.

Guns in the US are near saturation from a market perspective

The statistics show record gun sales. More and more Americans are becoming firearms owners for the first time, and existing owners are expanding their collections.

What's interesting (to me) about this stat is that retail sales are up, meaning mostly newly manufactured firearms, at a time when we're seeing a "rolling over" of one generation's possessions to another - baby boomers are actively passing their collections on (or selling) to the next generations in private transactions. So there are a lot of firearms changing hands to new owners now (for the last and next 5 years) that are unseen by these retail stats. Guns are a very durable good.

at a time when we're seeing a "rolling over" of one generation's possessions to another - baby boomers are actively passing their collections on (or selling) to the next generations in private transactions. So there are a lot of firearms changing hands to new owners now (for the last and next 5 years) that are unseen by these retail stats. Guns are a very durable good.

It’s a matter of changing tastes as well. A Gen Z would cherish her mom’s old M1911A1 as a family heirloom but she’ll want a tricked-out Combat Master for her own use cases.

From my anecdotal observation this is true. Gun sales are also growing among demographics not typically associated with gun ownership (non-white, non-conservative.)

There were between 2 to 5 million new gun owners (fbi and atf cant agree on much) in 2020. Legal gun ownership in the US is around 20+ million now.

Where do you get your ideas that the market isnt interested in guns? The issue with colt and Remington has been zero innovation and updating with the times. At bass pro shop, you could take a brand new Remington bolt action and need a sledge hammer to pull the bolt. A same class benelli needed barely a pinkie's worth of strength to do the same. Buttery smooth while the new Remingtons were already acting rusty.

The market has been going striker fire as well. I haven't noticed a big push from colt or rem before they shut down. Maybe they did, but it was too little too late.

Theres a lot more going on than just gUnS bAd. I'm happy for the hit on chemicalized tobacco. Makes it easier for the organic, natural market, mostly cigars and cigarillos. Let that marinate.

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