I agree about our industrial loss to China et al in a general way. But don’t we still make superb hunting rifles in this country?Beyond hunting rifles, I’ve looked at the Springfield Arms improvements and upgrades in the old M14 and they look damn good. And we are also talking design. Everything Apple makes is designed here. Don’t we still have excellent firearm designers?
That we do. What we lack is the manufacturing capability which we had in the day we could turn out a million battle rifles like the Garand annually, not to mention tanks, aircraft, and the like.
I’ve looked at the Springfield Arms improvements and upgrades in the old M14 and they look damn good.
They are indeed. But they started with a hell of a platform. I own a fairly 'vintage' M1A and it's an outstanding, if heavy, weapon. It's also wickedly accurate pretty much out of the box. The accurized ones are quite lethal at ranges of nearly 1,000 yards. That's not a rifle to be trifled with.
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“But don’t we still make superb hunting rifles in this country?”
Do we have the capability to produce 50,000 at a moments notice? I’m not sure if we do. I’m not saying we don’t, because Colt can...but who else?
“I’ve looked at the Springfield Arms improvements and upgrades in the old M14 and they look damn good.”
Not good enough to shed 4.5 lbs like the new one. Keep in mind, the military selects requirements and if SA doesn’t want to meet those reqs, then the contract goes elsewhere.
“Don’t we still have excellent firearm designers?”
Apparently they can’t convince the military they are, probably because greed intervened somewhere. Think about this: The week point of the M4 is the dirt and crud from the gas operation. How long did it take Colt to finally offer a gas tube assembly to keep the action clean? They charge so much to convert an M4 to the system that the military has only outfitted the Spec Ops guys with them. Colt could produce all of it’s rifles like this, but it would mess up the lucrative deal they have now.
You make great points, and I’m not discounting them all...but to me, this smells like a money issue. We have lost our ability to compete on everything because of greed from many parties. I won’t get into all of that. Suffice to say that we can buy just about anything made somewhere else cheaper. That’s sad.