Quote of the day—Elizabeth Saunders

In all the years I have been in business, I have never seen anything so blatantly un-American as that agreement. The establishment of a government oversight commission with virtually unlimited authority and no accountability is in itself a violation of the basic American concept of free enterprise. No reasonable business person could possibly sign this thing.

Elizabeth Saunders
CEO of American Derringer
March 24, 2000
American Derringer – Statement regarding S&W defection
[Smith & Wesson signed the agreement and came very close going bankrupt after gun owners spontaneously (not the NRA or any other gun rights organization) boycotted them. There were many people who were of the opinion that Smith & Wesson Must Die even after they backed out of the agreement.

See also this quote of Neal Knox about the depth the gun rights movement had fallen to in the mid 1970s. We sometimes think we have it bad now, but remember that in those dark ages we were close to getting national handgun licensing with people openly salivating at the next step being handgun confiscation:

In July 1976, Shields estimated that it would take seven to ten years for NCCH to reach the goal of “total control of handguns in the United States.”

Pete Shields was the chairman of the National Council to Control Handguns (which later became Handgun Control, Inc. which then became The Brady Campaign).

While we do have a long way yet to go we have come a long way.—Joe]

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3 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Elizabeth Saunders

  1. A little context here. When S&W signed that consent decree, it was the subject of 29 lawsuits which were designed to bankrupt the company. Its choice, sanctioned by the Clinton Administration, was to sign the decree or be destroyed.
    In 2006, when I was an instructor at a multi-agency academy, a S&W rep visited to flog the new M&P line and I spoke to him about it. I said, “When you’re being blackmailed by the government, who do you call?” He told me that they were also being blackmailed by their parent company, Tompkins, a British toilet manufacturer. They were told to sign the agreement or Tompkins would “close their doors.”
    Thankfully, S&W is now owned by an American company, and we should be able to put this all behind us.

  2. The biggest difference between the 1970s and now is that the bad guys have learned to hide their goals. The goals haven’t changed — but now they lie about it.

  3. the online archives for The Clinton Library have reams and reams of interesting material about the S&W deal.

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