America’s Oldest Gun Factory Closing Next Month

The country’s oldest gun factory will close its doors forever next month after more than 200 years of continued operation. The Remington Arms factory is leaving New York for a place that’s more welcoming to the firearms industry.

Remington Arms to Relocate Ilon, NY Factory to Georgia

Remington announced that it would move its facilities from Ilon, NY to Georgia. The move marks the end of an era where upstate New York was one of the nation’s largest firearms manufacturing regions.

The plant will cease operations on March 4, 2024. It’s stood in the same place since the height of World War 1. Eliphalet Remington founded his company, E. Remington and Sons, there in 1816. The massive, sprawling factory covers more than a million square feet of production space across multiple buildings.

Notably, the factory did not produce Remington-branded ammo. The facility making those cartridges is owned by Vista Outdoors and produced in Arkansas.

Why the Factory Closed

RemArms, the current owner of the factory, cited production inefficiencies and high maintenance costs as reasons for closing the plant. The plant currently employs about 300 workers, down from 1,300 a decade ago. The plant laid off nearly 550 workers in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ken D’Arcy, the company’s CEO, also cited legal hurdles as a reason for the plant’s shuttering. D’Arcy noted New York’s “legislative environment” as being particularly hostile to firearms and gunmakers in a press release.

Past Problems

The plant’s relocation is the latest in a string of woes for Remington. The plant had previously closed for a few months in 2020 and 2021, but reopened with a leaner team in an attempt to keep the factory afloat. Now, just three years later, it’s closing its doors for good.

Remington has been in hot water since before 2020, though. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2013 after settling a lawsuit with families of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting. The resulting restructuring led Remington to sell many of its patents, with much of their IP going to the plant’s new owner RemArms.

Final Thoughts

This isn’t the first time that a gun company has shuttered its production facility to move to a friendlier jurisdiction. Smith & Wesson, for example, relocated its headquarters from Connecticut to Tennessee in 2021. The company cited a “changing business climate” and negative attitudes towards guns in New England as the impetus for its move.

This has been happening since before the COVID-19 pandemic, too. Magpul, famous for making some of the most reliable magazines available today, relocated from my home state of Colorado to Texas in 2014. The move came after Colorado’s high-capacity magazine ban made most of the products Magpul made illegal in the Centennial State.

The move will leave a huge, empty manufacturing plant in the heart of the Rust Belt. If folks in Ilon were smart, they’d try to get some Federal money to turn the factory into a computer chip manufacturing plant. Their neighbors in Malta, NY have already done that.

My heart goes out to the hundreds of people who have lost their jobs due to the plant’s closing.