There is an interesting article on the history of Freedom Group here.
To me some of the more interesting stuff was the hints about gun bloggers:
rumors about the Freedom Group — what it is, and who is behind it — have been circulating in the blogosphere. Some gun enthusiasts have claimed that the power behind the company is actually George Soros, the hedge-fund billionaire and liberal activist. Mr. Soros, these people have warned, is buying American gun companies so he can dismantle the industry, Second Amendment be damned.
I vaguely remember something being said about that a while back but don’t remember it being anything we really took seriously.
And how about this?
the Freedom Group has ingested so many well-known brands so quickly that some gun owners are uneasy about what it might do next. Two years ago, a Cerberus managing director, George Kollitides, ran for the board of the N.R.A. Despite an endorsement from Remington, and the fact that he was a director of the Freedom Group and Remington, he lost. His campaign didn’t sit well with some gun bloggers, who viewed him as an industry interloper.
I don’t involve myself with the internal politics of the NRA that much. Was this really an issue? Or is the reporter exaggerating things a bit in an attempt to create a more interesting story?
Update: This is an article in the NYT (thanks Thirdpower) as well as the Herald Tribune which I originally linked to. The NYT version has the link to Sebastian and Bitter’s post about George Kollitides run for the NRA board of directors. I have updated the quoted paragraph above with the NYT link to their post.
Hmm, if only there were some gun blogger we could think of who would stoop so low as to gin up a fake controversy so as to generate lots of hits…I’m pretty sure I read it there first. Sounds pretty far-fetched to me.
Cerberus owns Chrysler and received federal bailout dollars. That’s the only thing I’ve ever heard gun folks hold against them.
This is also in the NYT and linked Sebastian TBFKASIH w/ this line :His campaign didn’t sit well with some gun bloggers,
The thing that worries me about the Freedom Group is the same thing that worries me about any single entity controlling that large of a share of the market.
It could be ACME Paper Co and their total control of toilet paper. In this case it’s guns.
Justin, Cerberus does not own Chrysler any longer.
Hilarious contrast to the usual lying gun control advocates’ falsehoods about the NRA being beholden to the gun industry.
I read the article in the NYT business section. It was interesting for a few reasons, almost none of them having to do with guns. Mostly, it was illuminating to read an article on a topic you know a little about and see how the reporter cobbled together a pretty long piece from a small array of facts. The core of the article about the Freedom group buying up several companies was pretty standard, but there was a lot of window dressing that was pretty irrelevant, e.g. paragraphs about the Beltway Sniper.
I do give the author credit for not playing up “assault rifles” excessively, but I did question the use of the word “controversial.” Semiauto rifles may be controversial in the newspapers, but certainly not in the industry or the field. There was description of buying preferences moving in the direction of tactical gear but the word “tactical” was only used once late in the article and without definition.
As an irrelevant aside, I have yet to see any suggestion in print that the interest in tactical style could be a byproduct of a decade of war plus extensive use of military-style SWAT teams. Am I the only one who thinks it’s a factor?
Eye5600; I think the increased interest in “tactical” gear was created by the anti gunnersd focus on eeevil assault weapons in the ’90s.
My father in-law sent me a chain e-mail a couple weeks ago about Soros owning Freedom Group. I responded to him saying I don’t think it would matter if it were true. If all the Freedom Group companies were shut down tomorrow it would create only a temporary shortage in the market. As smaller companies geared up to fill the demand, high prices would be funding their expansion. Big woof. The worst thing would be the demise of some classic American iconic brands.
In short; if any rich idiot wants to throw his money away in such stupidity, let him. There are plenty of us around to take over where his totally wasted investment left off. That all leftists entirely fail to grasp such simple concepts is no sweat off my back.
I’m just catching up on some stuff from over the holiday weekend, and I figured I’d throw in my two cents about what the real issue was in regards to the candidacy compared to the NYT “interpretation” of my post. I guess I was asking for it since I ignored their request for additional comment. I just didn’t have anything to say to the reporter and I don’t view my concerns about his potential performance on the NRA board as directly related to the way the company is run.