USRAC/Winchester: Twilight of a Legend
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
It was supposed to be a big year for the Model 70 Winchester, a celebration of its 70th anniversary.
US Repeating Arms Company (USRAC), which markets Winchester brand firearms under a licensing agreement with Olin/Winchester, had even announced several Model 70 variants with special emblems marking the milestone event that would have been introduced at this month’s Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show in Las Vegas.
Instead, the rifle is a casualty of economics, as is the legendary Model 94 lever-action series, and the Model 1300 shotgun. All three have been assigned to the graveyard with the announced closure of the USRAC factory in New Haven, CT, at the end of March.
There had been rumblings for years in the industry that the Winchester plant was going to close. Lately, less than 200 people have been on the payroll there, when in years past, many times that number held Winchester jobs.
Whether Winchester’s closure may translate to more sales of Savage, Browning, Remington, Weatherby and Ruger bolt-action rifles, remains to be seen. Other gunmakers aren’t commenting. But instead of a new Model 70 in someone’s rack this Fall, that spot might be filled by a new Mark V, Model 700, A-Bolt or M77, or one of Savage’s new American Classic models.
From a different perspective, is the demise of USRAC’s New Haven plant an ominous sign of the times? It is no secret that participation in hunting has been steadily declining for several years, and only recently has shown a slight rebound. During this decline, though, overall rifle and shotgun sales have continued to grow.
Ironically, the Winchester announcement came almost simultaneous to the release of a report by the National Sporting Goods Association (NSGA) that firearm sales are on the rise, based on data for 2004, the most recent year for which complete information is available.
According to that report, retail gun sales saw a 9.5% increase in 2004, totaling $1.9 billion. Of that, rifle sales totaled $722 million, for a 16.5% increase and shotgun sales of $534 million amounted to an increase of 1.9%, the report said.
However, it is not clear from the NSGA report whether those long gun purchases were for hunting, target shooting or more defensive types of rifles and shotguns.
All is not completely lost for Winchester fans. According to company spokesman Scott Grange, the Winchester name will live on with the production of select over-and-under shotguns, Winchester’s new Super-X semi-automatic rifle and Super X3 autoloading shotgun. Those guns are being manufactured in Portugal, Japan and Belgium.
However, a significant problem may lie on the horizon, because next year, a licensing agreement between USRAC and Olin Corporation, which still markets Winchester ammunition, is scheduled to end. That agreement has allowed USRAC to use the Winchester brand since 1981.
USRAC and Browning are both subsidiaries of the foreign-owned Herstal Group in Belgium. Browning will continue operations, based in Morgan, UT.
There apparently have been some inquiries from other firearms manufacturers about USRAC. New Haven has been feverishly working to salvage the situation, said Kelly Murphy, New Haven’s economic development administrator. She had only been on the job for about six weeks when the Winchester announcement came on Jan. 17, and she told Gun Week that it left her scrambling to “sort things out.”
“It’s a big blow to our manufacturing base,” she said.
On a positive note, Murphy said the ideal outcome for New Haven will be to keep Winchester operating, perhaps under new ownership.
“The heritage and history; there’s an extreme value to that,” Murphy said.
The idea would be to keep having Winchesters produced in the New Haven plant, rather than have some other company manufacturing them off-shore. Murphy pointed to the irony of “having the ‘Gun that won the West’ produced in . . . fill in the blank.”
Several Factors
The various factors leading to Winchester’s slide over the past several years are linked not only to the economy, but also to a decline in hunting participation, suggested Doug Painter, president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the industry trade organization that is also based in Connecticut. NSSF sponsors the SHOT Show.
Painter suggested that with the rise in the basic cost of living, including higher fuel prices, it is not as easy as it was a generation ago to pack up and take an annual hunting trip. Two other reasons people have dropped out of hunting are linked to declining opportunity, including loss of hunting land, and increasing regulation.
So, it is possible that the kinds of rifles and shotguns that people seem to be buying are not necessarily the type of sporting rifles and shotguns Winchester is selling.
In a recent issue of NSSF’s “Bullet Points” weekly news bulletin, there were links to stories about the hunting decline. For example, one editorial in The Portland Oregonian lamented that thousands of Beaver State hunters have quit because they could no longer justify the cost, and because they were faced with “phone-book-thick regulations” and a “blizzard of no-trespassing signs.” They have also been discouraged by a management scheme that established limited-entry tag drawings “which break up hunting parties and keep many eager hunters at home every fall.”
To counter this, NSSF has set up programs that help encourage states to adopt policies aimed at hunter recruitment and enhanced opportunity, especially for young people.
However, none of this helped stave off the economic realities of declining sales that led to the Winchester decision.
“The majority of hunters in this country are working people,” Painter observed, “and when the prices go up they have to cut their budget.”
The first thing to go in any household budget are so-called luxury items that are purchased with “disposable income.” In years past, Painter said, a new rifle might be a “reward purchase” because an outdoorsman or woman, or their spouse, decided that some kind of reward was due for having worked extra hours, overtime or an additional job during the year to bring in more income.
Nowadays, though, and especially during the Autumn of 2005, such “disposable income” was being disposed of at the fuel pump, where gasoline prices had soared to around $3 a gallon. The threat of congressional action, and hearings before the US Senate late last year curiously coincided with a drop in gas prices, but now the fuel price is creeping back upwards.
Part of Fabric
A second article cited by “Bullet Points” appeared in The Washington Monthly. Writer Christina Larson’s “The Death of Hunting” notes that in many states, where there is little public land and hunters are paying ever-increasing fees to hunt private land, the decline in below-median income hunters is startling. “Nationally,” she writes, “the number of hunters with below-median incomes has declined 16% in 15 years; over the same period, the number of hunters with above-median incomes has declined just 3%.”
Winchester is part of the American fabric, its lever-action Model 1873 having often been called “The Gun that Won The West.” Stories about the factory closure in various newspapers alluded to John Wayne, who often carried a Winchester Model 92 in his westerns. That gun, with its special loop lever, led Winchester to actually begin marketing Model 94 rifles with the same lever design in the 1980s.
The famed Model 70 was heralded as “The Rifleman’s Rifle” for many years in its pre-1964 heyday.
The 140-year-old company was founded in 1866 as the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Winchesters rode in the saddle scabbards of cowboys, lawmen and outlaws. Indians liked them because of their superior firepower over single-shot Springfields carried by the US Cavalry. The Model 1895 was a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1931, Olin Corporation, which also owned the Western Cartridge Company, purchased Winchester, putting the name not only on guns but on ammunition that went into them. Fifty years later, in 1981, US Repeating Arms Company (USRAC) was formed and continued to build firearms under the Winchester licensing agreement from Olin, which concentrated its attention on ammunition production. In 1987, USRAC was purchased by the Herstal Group, which also owns Browning.
USRAC has gotten considerable financial help over the past several years in an effort to keep the doors open. According to The Hartford Courant, over the past two decades, the New Haven plant had gotten a $2.7 million tax abatement provided it employed at least 400 people (a figure that was reduced through a 2001 re-negotiation), more than $17 million in incentives and had secured a whopping $33 million in loans. In 1994, a new and modern Winchester plant was built across the street from the original Winchester factory.
Still, because of a slump in firearms sales over the past dozen years, the financial support and new factory still was not enough to maintain a competitive business. Last year, the newspaper said, only 80,000 guns were produced at the New Haven factory even though that facility has a capacity of 300,000 guns a year.
Return to Archive Index