American Derringer on SW agreement

March 1st, 2012

For Immediate Release
March 24, 2000
For More Information:
Elizabeth Saunders – 254-799-9111

On March 17, Smith & Wesson, once a great American company, signed an
agreement with the Clinton Administration and the mayors that have been
illegally suing the firearms industry in a scheme to subvert our
Constitutional system of government and enact law without lawmakers.

Up until that day, the industry had held firm against this onslaught and
this attack on our Right to Keep and Bear Arms. We had resolved to not
submit to these acts of tyranny.

Sadly, one of us has chosen to surrender their rights, my rights and, to
an extent your rights. We here at American Derringer will never sign
onto any agreement that takes away the rights of others, and certainly
not to an agreement as one-sided as this on is. What makes this all the
sadder is that the company that surrenderd our rights isn’t even an
American company. It is the British firm Tomkins, PLC, desperate to sell
S&W, that agreed with the state-ists on Friday.

“In all the years I have been in business, I have never seen anything so
blatantly un-American as that agreement,” reacted Elizabeth Saunders,
American Derringer CEO after reviewing the entire 24 page document. “The
establishment of a government oversight commission with virtually
unlimited authority and no accountability is in itself a violation of
the basic American concept of free enterprise. No reasonable business
person could possibly sign this thing.”

The fact that these politicians have illegally used our courts as
bully-bats to try to force us to either capitulate to their demands or
be driven to bankruptcy is what is most infuriating. Time and again they
have gone to the people’s elected representatives with their false
promise of less crime through the persecution of law abiding gun owners.
And each time, the people’s representatives at virtually every level
have rejected their schemes.

So they decided to leave the people out of it. Obviously the people
weren’t having any of it. So they pulled their attorneys out of their
bag of tricks and unleashed an unprecedented, and certainly illegal
barrage of frivolous lawsuits at a perfectly lawful industry blaming us
for the acts of criminals. They seek no money in these lawsuits. They
seek exactly what they got from Smith & Wesson. Regulation with no law
behind it.

American Derringer condemns this action, and calls upon all of those
mayors to drop their attorneys and to start picking up the criminals and
putting them in prison and off our streets. The woeful record of this
administration when it comes to prosecuting federal firearms law
violations speaks for itself. And these are the same laws they demanded
and got.

“Now the Clinton administration and these mayors have a plan to somehow
consolidate the purchasing efforts of the thousands of law enforcement
agencies and use that purchasing power as a bludgeon to try to get more
companies to sign on to their agreement. I call that extortion,”
Saunders commented. “That is the depth to which they have sunk in their
desperation. They are willing to sacrifice the safety of law enforcement
officers by forcing them to only buy from signers of the agreement.”

We resent the continued implication that we in the firearms industry and
that the lawful firearms owners in this nation are somehow responsible
for the level of violent crime that we face. We resent the continued
vilification of guns and firearms enthusiasts by the president and his
minions. We resent the manipulated and twisted statistics being doled
out and demand that the real numbers and real facts be presented to the
American people.

Most of all, we are angered by the assault on our Constitutional rights
by these people. Their claim that the settlement by just one of the many
companies in this industry justifies their actions Their claim does not
ring true. No other company in this industry has even given this
agreement a second look. We certainly won’t.

American Derringer will always support and defend the right of
law-abiding Americans to keep and bear arms and the right to protect
family and home.