Magpul: We Weren’t Kidding
Jonn’s pretty busy today, so I’m posting this one on his behalf.
As Jonn wrote here some months ago, last year both Beretta and Magpul publicly went on record as opposing proposed changes to firearms laws in their respective states (the People’s Republic of Maryland and Colorado, respectively). Both firms were essentially ignored by those states, which each enacted truly ignorant and in practice utterly meaningless and counterproductive substantially tighter gun control laws.
Well, regarding Magpul the other shoe has now dropped. Magpul announced yesterday that it will indeed move its production/distribution/shipping operations and corporate headquarters outside of Colorado. Production/distribution/shipping will move to Cheyenne, WY; the corporate headquarters, to a yet-to-be-determined location in Texas.
Way to go, Colorado. Looks like when Magpul told you you were about to GFY, you were too stupid to listen. Tell those jobs – and the taxes they generated – goodbye.
Your turn, Beretta.
Category: Guns
Well, Colorado really doesn’t give a shit, because they are going to be raking in the big bucks by taxing the crap out of pot. They won’t even notice that Magpul has left, because they’re going to be rich and stoned.
It’s probably the reason that pot is now legal for recreational use in Colorado.
However, I’d rather have sharpshooters than stoners on my front lawn. The sharpshooters are useful people.
But these are the same idiots who think that the taxes generated from selling hippie lettuce are going to make up for the loss of Magpul and all the people they employed who are now living outside of Colorado.
Memo to you idiots in Denver: Uh, no. Even if Magpul directly didn’t pump $40 million into the state coffers, you’re losing money not just because of their moving, but because of pro 2A folks who are telling you they won’t support your economy, etc.
But hey, you went and shot yourselves in the foot, you get to deal with the pain.
Beretta better move. I’d like a ARX-100, but not with “Made in Maryland” on the side.
The Magpul move will not greatly affect tax revenues, I suppose. On the other hand, CO’s loss of an estimated 250 jobs means that 250 people or so will seek unemployment benefits and, perhaps, avail themselves of other costly state supportive resources. Then there’s the loss of revenue for the local gas stations and eateries and who knows what. Not including those things, the state will be losing an estimated 70-85 million is revenue from shows, hotel bookings and so forth. They had better be selling a whole lotta dope to make up for all of that. The hidden costs are often devastating when a good-sized company moves out.
Spade–I’m perfectly happy with my M1911, even if it does have, “Made in Springfield, MA” on it.
Just means the Massholes can’t have one, that’s all.
AirCav–I did a little more looking, and the state of Colorado “expects” to get about $67 million in pot revenues.
And while again, Magpul and their employees alone won’t result in a loss of anywhere near that much, couple that with the enforcement costs of making sure that people from out-of-state don’t buy, kids don’t buy, people don’t drive stoned, etc., etc., etc., and the people (like me) who won’t support Colorado’s economy as long as their anti-2A policies remain in effect, and yeah, that’ll bite them in the ass good and hard.
@7. I read that the ‘Dope on a Slope’ operation is cash and carry ONLY. Talk about a target for robbers. At 400-500 an ounce for dope, with an 1/8 the min purchase, that’s a whole lotta cash on dem thar lines! So, Colorado is offsetting the loss of good jobs that feed the local economy with selling dope to dopers! Somehow, I don’t consider that an even trade, regardless of the bucks involved. But, hey, it’s their state. They can do whatever they want, the knuckleheads.
I read somewhere that Beretta took Virginia off of its list of potential locations because we elected a gun grabber as our next Goobernor.
Sucks to be us. (I’ve said that way too many times recently.)
@8 Good point Air Cav. The State of Colorado just set up countless high value targets for criminals. I mean if I were looking to “turn my life around” as so many do, why would I waste time on the local 7-11? I would beeline for the closest pot shop at closing time and take my chances there. I wonder though if they will allow the pot shop employees to go armed in the store or have arms in the store for defense? They made a messed up bed in Colorado and now they have to lie in it. It’s not the potheads they will have to worry about so much. It will be the meth heads and crack heads looking to score. Good luck to all the late shift employees in these places.
Read earlier that Magpul will pay to relocate those current employees that are willing to move.
Way to go Magpul! I even have a Magpul case for my iPhone and it’s the best one I have seen.
Pity they are relocating to the DFW area…. if they came to Houston they’re a company I’d be proud to work for.
From what I understand the weed will be available for out of state residents. But they have a limit like 1/4 oz bought at a time or something. I don’t use, don’t really care. We missed killing those gun laws by three votes, and we were able to recall two of them. Everyone here is expecting a big push to remove more through election in the fall. Colorado will hopefully be pulled back from the ledge. The pot tourism is going to be huge. Lot of stoners out and about these days.
Colorado pols don’t want you to be able to buy Magpul products, but they want you to enjoy smoking pot. GOD help America!
Receptionist at Magpul: GOV of Colorado on line # 1 sirm
CEO of Magpul: Tell him to go fu@k himself!
Receptionist: Yes sir. GOV the CEO says, “go fu@k yourself”.
GOV: But, but, but …
Receptionist: I guess so, if you like it there … Go a head and fu@k youself in your butt!
That should be “sir.”
What’s with all the cannabis bashing? I know for a fact that cannabis saved me and improved mine and my families quality of life. With the high rate of service member suicides we should be spearheading the cannabis movement but instead many of you hold onto the tired dogma chanted by those making a dollar off prohibition. Maybe some of you should do some research before calling us “hippies” and “potheads” I served 10 years in the Infantry but because I chooses a plant over alcohol as my vice of choice does that make me a lesser person?
I don’t think they are going to outlaw shooting DREIGER LR-5’s though. Ever shot a DREIGER?
What’s with all the cannabis bashing? I know for a fact that cannabis saved me and improved mine and my families quality of life. With the high rate of service member suicides we should be spearheading the cannabis movement but instead many of you hold onto the tired dogma chanted by those making a dollar off prohibition. Maybe some of you should do some research before calling us “hippies” and “potheads” I served 10 years in the Infantry but because I choose a plant over alcohol as my vice of choice does that make me a lesser person?
Well, since you asked, yeah, it does, to those who consider criminals to be “lesser” persons.
The most jobs are going to be in Wyoming. That’s only an hours drive from here. (I live near Magpul) Smart move on their part. They can keep most of their suppliers and the employees can commute until they find a place in Cheyenne.
Contrary to all stereotypes about SoCal natives, I don’t smoke weed. Never have, never will. I also don’t surf, drive a hybrid, or own a pair of board shorts. So it’s really no skin off my ass either way if they legalize it or not.
But with the cost of the legalized shit over there, it seems to me like the home growers can make a killing selling their herb cheaper than the government-sanctioned dealers. Sure, it’ll be illegal, but how is that any different from what they’ve already been doing? And how much money will THAT cost the state of Colorado every year in investigation, enforcement, and lost tax revenues?
Just a thought.
@15 We can buy Magpul products. Just not in Colorado. You can still buy AR-15s here just not the 30 round magazines. Just hop up the road to Wyoming, just as we do for the outlawed fire works that light up my neighborhood every July.
We will have more of things like the train wreck outside Baltimore caused by pot smoking engineers and the pot smoking Canadian guy that lowered a draw bridge unto a ship.
“What’s with all the cannabis bashing?” says the stoner who posted the same thing twice, separated by 12 minutes? Talk about answering your own question.
This just encourages libtards to enact more anti gun laws. It’s a win for them.
Remember these are the same idiots that are financially irresponsible in the first place.
Spearhead the cannabis movement! What a groovy sentiment. Jeez. Well, it’s like this Mr. Munchie. If there is a medicinal purpose to THC, and there appears to be at least one, then one would be foolish not to use it, if prescibed. But if one is going to self medicate, with alcohol or dope, then doing either is not very wise and merely masks the underlying issue. Both are drugs, both alter mood and perception, and the use of either invites abuse. Because something is legal in certain places isn’t a Good Housekeeping seal of approval for its use. It merely means that one who legally uses either is not subject to criminal prosecution for possessing it. As for spearheading anything, no thanks. I don’t want to be near a doper or a drunk who is wielding a spear.
Once again people just dance around the subject of cannabis with moral grandstanding and witty comments meanwhile my brothers and sisters take their lives at the rate of one a day. I am my brothers keeper and if it means I take a little name calling and uneducated opinions based, so be it. There is a reason the first recreational buyer in Colorado was a Vet with PTSD, he, like many of us, found cannabis to be the answer to the issues we returned home with.
Stoned Gunman: so, to paraphrase: it’s your chemical crutch of choice to enable you to handle reality. So you want to use it to self-medicate in an unsupervised, medically-questionable, and (with respect to Federal law) unlawful manner however you see fit – consequences to society be damned.
Opiates and psychedelics reputedly work for the same purpose as well; some people prefer stimulants such as PCP, cocaine, and meth instead. Are you advocating legalizing those also?
The fact that you classify all of those together shows how uneducated you are on the subject of cannabis, maybe go read some of the studies done by the Israelis for their veterans. Guys like you are the reason vets don’t seek help for their issues and instead swallow a bullet, guess we should have all come back and went back to our lives and lived happily ever after? Cannabis helped me connect again with loved ones and helped me deal with little things like going to the mall or being in a crowd it also lessened the nightmares and many of the aches and pains of humping a ruck for ten years. I haven’t missed a day of work in 5 years and have been in a stable relationship for 7 years, two things I struggled with greatly before cannabis came into my life and after two suicide attempts I can say that it saved my life. So please take the moral high ground and judge me to your hearts content and I will continue to promote something that can and has saved soldiers lives.
Alcohol is much more dangerous then marijuana ever will be. Alcohol has ZERO medicinal uses. But the old fogies will never be convinced because “drugs are bad mmkay.”
Oh lookie, we have a little stoner rally going here. That’s cute.
Oh look we have a rally of ignorance going on. Isn’t that cute?
@34. Yes, it’s said that originality is the first casulaty of heavy marijuana use. On another note:
Well, for those of you who are wondering, Obama and his DOJ are good with Colorado’s legalization of marijuana. Sure, it’s a federal crime but, what the heck, oaths really don’t matter, whether it’s Fast & Furious gun running, turning a blind eye to videos of voter intimidation, unilaterally declaring an act of Congress to be unconstitutional, or directing that certain laws not be enforced. Yep, it’s true. The DOJ issued a memo giving notice that it will not enforce federal drug laws in Colorado. I don’t care, personally, we could do with a great deal more state control of state business and less from the feds, but I continue to marvel at The Emperor’s curious view of his own job and the powers attendant to it.
So to the Mary Jane advocates here, your answer to a vet in trouble is not to assist him in seeking professional help but instead to stick a joint in his mouth? That about right? Stoned Gunman you argument centers around one subject, veterans who commit suicide and that it can be prevented by marijuana. The thoughts and emotions that bring a person to the point of considering suicide are not written in stone. They are as varied and unique as the person experiencing them. You are offering a one fix for all problems, solution. It is just too simplistic and sounds like the old snake oil and elixir remedies. The truth is you are trying to justify your own use of an illegal substance and using a heart tugging issue to do it. Brother I have heard it since Vietnam and it just doesn’t hold water. I say do what you want. It is a free country and as long as you are willing to do the time if you are caught for the crime…your choice. This thread began as a story about a gun a gun manufacturer leaving Colorado and digressed into a discussion of cannabis. That’s okay and happens on other threads. But just don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining when it comes to justifying your behavior in the name of all veterans who may be suffering. For the suffering vet who buys your advice and then takes his life when it doesn’t work…that will be a heavy load to carry don’t you think.
No, Sparks, they would feel no responsibility at all in that scenario. Their world includes no responsibility for anything they do because they always have an excuse. And it’s always someone else’s fault, no matter what they do. Or don’t do.
@36
Marijuana has been proven to treat a lot more then just PTSD. Yes there are people who argue for medical marijuana that truly have no interest in using it medicinally but the same can be said for any drug. Just because a drug has a risk for abuse doesn’t mean we should look past its beneficial properties.
@ #38: Do you apply that same argument to the anything other than drugs?
That argument can be applied to anything. Guns, fast cars..
To make something illegal because it COULD be used for a certain purpose says a lot about society and the people who support such ideas.
@ #41: Then why are you commenting here on a topic about a company deciding where it should be located? If you should have the freedom to decide for yourself what is in your best interest, should not Magpul have the same freedom?
Obviously the answer is yes. I never made any comment to the contrary. I unfortunately live in the people’s republic of maryland but will soon be moving to a state that respects individual freedoms.
Cheech and Chong and Jim from the old TV show Taxi’ character remain the poster boys for smoking dope. Dope dealing is associated with insane violence and brutality. Dope, in all its types, is associated with the destruction of families and lives. In that regard, it shares much with alcohol. And dopers like to hold up alcohol for comparison and contrast. That’s not, and never was, a winner, and most proponents of legalizing dope learned that over time. So, now, it’s about medicinal value. The usual route for drug development is that drugs are developed in response to a particular medical issue. In the case of marijuana, it has been around for a long time but it took many decades for some medicinal value to be attributed to it. Previously, it was (and remains) a tool to get high and nothing more. Want to get high? Go for it. Want to require that your employer overlook the THC positive? Sorry, that ain’t happening. Want to insist at the out-of-state police stop or at the airport that the dog hit on microbes of legally obtained dope? Go for it. In the meantime, enjoy the high. At a 29% tax rate (i.e., Denver, CO state + local tax), the state and city have only your best medical interest at heart, I’m sure.
I am from Colorado. I plan on retiring in Colorado. I was raised by bikers. I have also just about finished my 20 years in the Army. I just had 12% of my retirement or $92,000 stolen from me by congress. I have never even tried the damn drug. (With bikers for parents the only way to rebel is to be clean cut and get good grades…)
The state is not going to go to hell. I likely think there is not going to be much of change because of either situation. Tourism will go up, more people will do stupid things and have to pay. Such is life.
And from what I have seen and read over the years, Marijuana got a bad rap from the goverment. Not the scientists or doctors. It works as a treatment. I have good friends that take extracts of it for seizures. Some of them prior service.
So as a person who does not use it I say this. If you drink alchohol you come off as pretty much a hypocrite. I have seen a lot more death causing from that drug than from the other. Besides, the junk food and fast food businesses will grow accordingly.
I suppose it depends on how one measures death associated with alcohol. The gov’t likes to measure it by car accidents involving death. We’ve all heard the police quoted as saying that alcohol was a factor. Did you know that it is a factor if there is any alcohol in a vehicle, whether or not the occupants were drinking? How about that the rear seat passenger was drunk but the drivers were sober? Yep, alcohol is included as a stat. How about a driver who is well under the legal limit? Of course. Now, look at drug killings. Are they reported as murders involving the sale or purchase of drugs? No. They are listed as murders. How many burglaries are committed by dopers looking for money and other goodies to buy dope? They are just burgalries, or thefts, or prostitution and not drug-related for government statistical purposes. So, when one wants to compare and contrast alcohol and other drug usage for effect, legality aside, one really ought to be very careful.
@45: Your comparing apples and oranges with your stateme3nt about drunk driving deaths. Just because many are killed, more dying will be better, because then you won’t be a hypocrite for it? I don’t get that. I guess if you want to make pot legal; one of he first things you should do is determine what the threshold is for driving impaired while high as a giraffe’s ass and how do you test for it? Don’t you think that it would be a good idea to have that in place BEFORE making a drug legal? Since it’s all about the science; let the scientists tell the lawmakers how long a person is impaired on specific amounts of the drug. How do you determine it based on how potent the specific type of dope the person was using is? Do you have to, as a police officer, have a laminated card with all this information on it, so that you can determine if the person is impaired enough to not be able to drive? Is there a breathalyzer for it? When someone gets pulled over and they say they haven’t fired up in 12 hours; how do you tell if they are under this non-existent threshold? How about when you are on the job and something happens and you have to go in for a piss test and you pop hot; do you fight your firing in court, because it is legal to get baked, but you can’t prove that you weren’t under the influence at the time of the accident? Yeah, these are all questions that demand answers, but, unfortunately, no one wants to look at the details, because it doesn’t sound as cool as the big splash and easy rhetoric about making dope legal. I don’t have a problem with medicinal purposes, because it help my parents when they were going through cancer treatment, and I don’t know of anyone who is against it for that reason. I think that the medicinal argument is thrown in, because those that are for legalization don’t have much defensive ammo, so they… Read more »
@47 Thanks Old Trooper. You said it very well. Especially about the medicinal usage. I am all for giving cancer patients and some of the other medical conditions which are relieved by marijuana the legal use of it. That is merciful. I don’t believe however, that the lines in Colorado are filled with cancer patients and glaucoma patients. They are filled with people who want to get high for the sake of getting high with their drug of choice. You asked some serious questions which at present, as you pointed out, have no answers. I think the cart is really before the horse in this matter in Colorado.
The reason this thread became a discussion about cannabis is because many vets came on here complaining about the government trying to regulate the size of magazines and talk about a company that exercised it’s right to move and show displeasure at those interventions. In the process of voicing displeasure many of you felt the need to make snide comments about hippies and cannabis in general, I just felt the need to show that because many of us chose cannabis to treat our issues, something entirely legal in 20 states (only 7 currently recognize PTSD), we are still vets, we still stood the line when others would not yet many of you talk as if we are lesser men for doing so. Do I believe that cannabis is a panacea? No but I do know for a fact that it can help many and I try to educate as many as I can about its benefits. It does amaze me that so many of you are against government intervention when it comes to magazine size but are totally fine with them regulating every aspect of your personal health. If they came out with a study tomorrow that said shoving a carrot up your ass treated PTSD, TBI or any of the various combat related injuries, would I do it? No but I would support any vets choice to do so because he’s earned the right to be called my brother and I have his back despite my moral reservations about vegetable insertions.
@44 Pretty much everything in that entire comment is false or your personal opinion. Cannabis has been used medicinally for thousands of years and even used here until the early 1900s as a medicine for numerous ailments. It wasn’t until they needed a reason to round up Mexicans and slow down the hemp industry for the cotton/paper/nylon companies that it magically became evil and the scourge of our youth. There was money to made in making it illegal and there is lots of money in keeping that way now. Please don’t take my word for any of these things, take few minutes from your day and do a bit of research and form you own opinions, hopefully based on facts not what you saw on TV or the government told you.