Colt Firearms Company Shutdown for State Capitol Protest Against Gun Ban/Restriction Statutes

On Thursday morning March 14, 2013, the President of Colt's Manufacturing Company, one of the oldest firearms manufacturers in the U.S., and a major supplier of AR-15 rifles to civilian Americans and M4 select-fire carbines to the U.S. military, shutdown his three shift 24/7 Connecticut factory, and bused all his day shift employees to the state capitol in a grassroots effort to oppose new gun ban laws there. According to Colt President Dennis Veilleux,  a  proposed ban on manufacturing of modern firearms in Connecticut would cause the loss of hundreds of jobs there.

Colt Manufacturing President, Dennis Veilleux

Colt President Veilleux rented ten buses and transported all of his day shift workers, and as many of his second and third shift workers as possible, to the Connecticut state capitol. Colt has been manufacturing firearms in Connecticut for about 175 years. Veillieux said, "These are the faces of the jobs at Colt. Each of theses people represents other people in the state. They represent the community, and in a lot of cases, they're the breadwinners of their families. ... more and more, manufacturing jobs are hard to come by." One Colt manufacturing engineer explained that machinists at Colt Manufacturing earn $25.00 to $30.00 per hour. 

Over 500 Colt employees occupied the Connecticut legislative office building, holding signs that read "Save Our Jobs", but the legislators were negotiating behind closed doors. It appears that legislators in Connecticut, like some in other states, have the misguided belief that depriving law abiding citizens of their constitutional right to keep and bear arms, might somehow prevent a future mass shooting massacre such as the one which occurred in Sandy Hook, Connecticut on December 14, 2012. However, people who haven't been emotionally blinded by such catastrophic, but rare and isolated incidents, admit that such statutory laws will not do anything to prevent such tragedies. In fact the worst school massacre in U.S. history, was committed with a bomb, not with a firearm. In nearly case, extreme mental disturbance appears to have been the root cause of such mass shooting massacres. However, there have been few if any proposals to make changes to such laws as involuntary psychiatric commitment statutes, so that such people might be institutionalized for treatment before they are able to plan and perpetrate terribly heinous  killings.

A few Connecticut legislators have expressed willingness to provide an exemption for commercial firearms manufacturers to produce firearms the legislators want to ban in the state, while at the same time prohibiting those manufacturers from selling the banned firearms within the state. Nearly every firearms manufacturer in the U.S. has threatened to move their companies and their manufacturing facilities out of states that enact such bans. Colt Present Veilleux stated that Colt has already begun a boycott of New York State because of similar gun ban and gun confiscation statutes, explaining that, "Our customers don't want to support the state of New York. So our customers aren't going to want to support the state of Connecticut," concluding that in his opinion  "... our association is so strong with the state of Connecticut, that it's inevitable that it's going to begin to erode."