Gun maker once reviled for effort to compromise
When Devin Patrick Kelley took a Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic assault rifle to the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in November, he brought 15 high-capacity magazines that each contained 30 bullets. How many did he empty? “All of them,” a Texas law enforcement official said at a news conference in the days after the massacre of 26 people.
If William Ruger Sr., the late co-founder of gun maker Sturm, Ruger & Co., had had his way, Kelley’s firepower might have been much diminished. In 1989, Ruger proposed a ban on high-capacity magazines, which led a smaller rival to call Sturm, Ruger “the Benedict Arnold of the gun industry.”
In 1994, he said his company would sell a high-capacity magazine only to police officers.
“Someone who is not a police officer can buy one made elsewhere, but we can’t do anything about that,” he said. “What we can do is be a responsible firearms manufacturer ourselves. And we believe we are.”
Ruger was certainly not a cheerleader for gun control. But considering the tide of mass shootings and gridlock on the issue of guns, his willingness to compromise is worth revisiting.
Ruger, a Brooklyn-born gun designer, took an inventor’s interest in guns after his father gave him a rifle at age 12. A 1981 profile in the New York Times reported that he read everything he could about guns at the New York Public Library and “studied gun metallurgy, gun mechanisms, gun designs” and “came to regard the gun as a uniquely engineered tool.”
He also liked to recount how he once revealed to guests at a manhattan cocktail party what he did for a living.
“When you mention you’re in the gun business, people look shocked,” he said. “They infer that you have an utter disregard for human life, which is preposterous.”
He said at the time: “There’s so much hostility, so many people stimulated to violence. But to be talking about gun legislation as a cure for this is ridiculous.”
His position appeared to evolve. A series of mass shootings captured headlines in the following years. Among them, an unemployed security guard named James Oliver Huberty used an Uzi semi-automatic rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and a 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol during a 1984 rampage at a McDonald’s in California that left 21 dead and 19 wounded. In 1991, an unemployed merchant seaman, George Hennard, shot 22 people dead at a cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and injured another 20.
With momentum building for gun control, Ruger’s move was partly tactical. He and his allies wanted “to take a responsible position to head off any further restrictions that might even have banned all semiautomatic firearms,” Robert Wilson wrote in the book “Ruger and His Guns.”
Gunmakers are not proposing gun control anymore. After the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre led to the deaths of 20 firstgraders and six adults in Connecticut, Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., was a co-sponsor of legislation that would have required universal background checks.
“I’m a big believer in the Second Amendment, I’m a gun owner and take my son shooting,” he said in an interview. But at the same time, he said, “I think it’s completely reasonable to make it more difficult for those who do not have a legitimate right to a firearm to obtain them.”
The legislation, which was also sponsored by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., failed.