Quote:Quote:
I don't ever buy anything Smith and Wesson, they can go straight to hell as far as I'm concerned. My father and grandfather hold a grudge against them for their acceptance of gun control back in 2000 and I plan on continuing the tradition. You might have some other information concerning that event (I was fairly young at the time), but from what I understand they compromised with the feds to push gun control and stay in business themselves.
Ah, yes.
So the short version is in 2000 S&W was owned by Tompkins, a UK-based multinational. After they made that deal with Clinton, there was massive backlash and they were boycotted by loads of people which resulted in S&W being sold cheap to a new company that is not made up of gun-hating cockholsters. (Just looked it up, there are details on wikipedia.) So the people who made the 2000 deal have nothing to do with S&W now. But lots of people don't know that, and they just remember that S&W screwed American gun owners.
Thompson/Center is a subsidiary of S&W, as it happens.
Along similar lines, lots of people still avoid Ruger products because Bill Ruger sold out gun owners by supporting magazine capacity limits in the 90s (actually 1989, looked it up). Well, Bill Ruger's been dead for over a decade and in the last 5-6 years Ruger has really jumped on board with producing high quality, affordable weapons that old Bill would've never been okay with.
Gun people have long memories but sometimes the details just get lost in time. I'm all for voting with my wallet, but when the assholes who actually sold me out are out of the picture, it doesn't make much sense to me to keep punishing a good pro-RKBA company forever.
As to Taurus maybe they've gotten better, because supposedly in the last couple years they've been making a real push to improve their quality control, but they have a terrible reputation for QA/QC and customer service. Their guns are in the "buy if you cannot afford anything better and really need protection" category as far as I'm concerned, and I'd expect even a new and improved Taurus to start failing after a few thousand rounds. On the other hand, I know S&W (and Ruger) wheelguns are good.