Originally Posted by
idahoron
I was talking with Mark Slidlinger he was Remington's VP of marketing at one time....
I told him that the gun manufactures are losing sight of what a gun is supposed to be. When I was a kid Remington's, Winchesters, things of beauty and shot well. They were handed down to like minded family members and those guns are still in service, or could be today.
The problem is manufactures are just producing guns that will get a guy by. They are cheap enough that he can buy one try it and if he doesn't like it sell it and get something else...
If a guy wants a quality firearm now days you have to look at manufactures that are not the big guys. Some are fantastic rifles and it was my opinion that those types of rifles were what was spelling the end of the big manufactures.
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Could you tell us his response?
What you describe actually creates a problem for a gun manufacturer. A grandfather passes on his old pre-64 model 70 Winchester to a grandson and now the youngster has no need to buy a gun at all.
There's also other dynamics at work. Today, fewer youth are hunting, and they don't get introduced to guns through hunting. They get introduced to guns increasingly through video games and movies, and that's what they want to shoot. Hence, many are far more interested in AR style rifles and semi-auto pistols than they are in wood and steel bolt actions and Smith and Wesson model 10 revolvers. If they get Grandpa's model 70, it may less appeal to them than an AR-15., and they sell the Winchester to get the black rifle.
A gun that just gets a guy by is actually a boon for a gun manufacturer. It means the purchaser may or will eventually buy another gun. (This is what led to the idea of "planned obsolescence" in the 1960s).
And this is the truth about today's budget guns: Even a lowly plastic stock Axis, 783, American, or similar sometimes reported to get less than 1 MOA out of the box. 2 MOA is probably substandard. They often outperform yesterday's wood and steel beauties. A lot of new buyers just want a gun to hunt deer with, the less expensive budget rifle gets it done just fine.
Today's gun market for traditional hunting rifles is actually becoming glutted, and that's narrowing the profit margins. A small company that makes really high end guns can make a go of it, but large corporations do better with volume sales at a low price. The money for them probably lies more in selling an inexpensive bolt action, ARs, and semi-auto pistols--those wonder nines like the Glocks.
They're not pretty, but they're profitable. That's what increasing numbers of customers want and that's where the money lies. What a gun is supposed to be is dictated by the buyers in the market, and more of them are saying they want something besides fine wood and steel. They want something affordable and they want something cool like the gun in the video game. Fail to give them that, and a company's guns will not sell and that heads them towards bankruptcy.
The other problem is one we've faced before: the problem of production costs. They doomed classic guns like the pre-64 Winchesters and the Savage 99. They were costly to make and had to be priced too high for adequate sales and profitability. It's the same today with a plastic stock bolt action. That plastic keeps the costs down and the profitability up because so much of the buying is driven by the price tag, not the material that went into the stock .