Advertisement

Colt suspends production of AR-15 and other rifles for the civilian market

AR-15
Three variations of the AR-15 are displayed at the California Department of Justice in August 2012.
(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)
Share

Firearms maker Colt is suspending its production of rifles for the civilian market, including the popular AR-15, the company said Thursday in a shift it attributed to changes in consumer demand and a market already saturated with similar weapons.

The company said it will focus instead on fulfilling contracts with military and police customers for rifles.

“The fact of the matter is that over the last few years, the market for modern sporting rifles has experienced significant excess manufacturing capacity,” Colt Chief Executive Dennis Veilleux said in a written statement. “Given this level of manufacturing capacity, we believe there is adequate supply for modern sporting rifles for the foreseeable future.”

Advertisement

Veilleux said the company, which emerged from bankruptcy in 2016, remains committed to the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. He said the company is expanding its lines of pistols and revolvers.

Despite a national debate on gun control, Colt’s decision seems driven by business considerations rather than politics, said Adam Winkler, a gun policy expert at the UCLA School of Law.

FBI statistics show that more than 2.3 million people applied for background checks to purchase guns in August, up from just over 1.8 million in July. Those applications, the best available statistic from tracking gun sales, have been rising steadily, with a slight decline after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.

Gun sales usually go up when buyers believe their access to such weapons is being threatened, Winkler said.

“Given these sales and the history of Colt being a completely disorganized, dysfunctional company that goes into bankruptcy and can’t keep anything going properly, my assumption is that this is a business decision that is being driven by their own business problems,” he said.

Still, Winkler said, the company’s decision risks alienating and angering its remaining customer base.

Advertisement

“We’ve seen in the past that when gun manufacturers are viewed to have given in to gun safety advocates, gun owners will boycott them and really hurt their business,” he said. “If they think a company like Colt is disrespecting their identity or giving in to the other side, Colt’s likely going to see serious damage to its other firearms brands too.”

The debate on gun control has focused in particular on assault-style rifles like AR-15s that have been used in mass shootings.

Democratic presidential candidate and former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, whose hometown of El Paso was the site of an August attack that killed 22 people, has been pushing for mandatory rifle buybacks over the last few weeks.

“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47, and we’re not going to allow it to be used against your fellow Americans anymore,” O’Rourke said during a Democratic presidential debate this month.

The parents of a young woman killed in the 2017 Las Vegas massacre filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in July against Colt and seven other gun manufacturers, along with gun shops in Nevada and Utah, arguing that their weapons are designed to be easily modified to fire like automatic weapons.

In Connecticut, Remington Arms Co. is facing a lawsuit involving liability for the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in which a gunman used a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle to kill 20 first-graders and six educators.

Advertisement