Original subtitles

I think what's often lost sight of today is that the Constitution is there to

protect the citizen from government.

That it is the bulwark that sustains the liberties we are so used to having that

we're not even aware of.

If it were not for the Constitution, there would be no fixed points as to our

social arrangements. They reassured these 13 colonies that they were not

bartering away fundamental liberties that they wanted.

In other words, it enlarged on the original concept of the Constitution,

much more concrete, and enabled the Constitution to be adopted by the 13

colonies. Gave it that force, which it still has today.

And people who talk about noodling with this thing, or making it say what they

want it to say, are the very people that we should regard as dangerous and wrong

to listen to.

Governments are instinctively, automatically, and inevitably,

There's no question about it.

Bill, what prompted you to make firearms rather than doorknobs, say, or

something equally prosaic?

Why guns?

Well, you know they're interesting.

Fascinating.

And there's just something about a thing like a firearm or

a boat.

that any man really can develop a genuine enthusiasm about or interest in.

When I was a boy and when I was in my teens, I just loved to shoot, and part

the reason was that I liked the firearms themselves.

It wasn't just shooting to hit something, but it was to use that well,

firearm well, you know.

And there were some firearms I thought were better than others. I liked them

better one way or another, one reason or another.

When I first learned...

the principles under which machine guns function.

I was just fascinated.

It was almost like a little kid finding out how a steam engine works or an

internal combustion engine.

I almost immediately started making drawings of how I would incorporate

principles. And, of course, it was all very limited because you can't design a

thing if you have no idea of how things are manufactured.

I can remember even that at one point I was just astonished to learn that there

was such a thing as machine tools, that there was a thing called a lathe that

could turn steel or drill steel with drill presses and mill steel and shape

with old -fashioned shapers and planers. I mean, to me, this was, ah, that's how

these hard steel parts are formed.

You know, to some child that's been used to making things with a hammer and saw,

it was a revelation.

And I must say that guns weren't the only thing I tried to design at first,

they have always been the thing that came back to most strongly in Urchin.

I just loved guns.

I loved the outdoors hunting experience.

I always wanted to be an explorer.

It was sort of one of the ironies of my life that there's nothing much left to

explore. But people can talk about exploring space and exploring with a

microscope and all these sublimations, you know, but that's not tramping

the jungle and seeing a river for the first time in recorded history.

But that's what I'd have loved to have done.

I was actually pretty close to Mr. Ruger.

In many ways, it was a very paternalistic relationship, and I spent

time with him and knew a lot about him.

He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and it was rural at the time, and he learned

to shoot out there. He had a .22 rifle that his father actually gave him when

was 12.

At the time, you could take a rifle from your home and get on a streetcar and go

out to the end of the streetcar line and go shooting, and that's what they did,

and that's how he developed his love of shooting.

wasn't all that good.

Bill's father unfortunately committed suicide.

And so Bill then was shunted off to live with aunts and grandparents and things

like that. So he didn't have the guidance of his father, and I got the

impression that they were fairly distant to each other. He attended the

University of North Carolina. He started out as a business major because the

family thought, you know, that would be a good thing to make money.

Didn't like it at all.

And after two years, he dropped out.

And he began designing his first guns there on the dining room table of his in

-laws, which is where they were living in North Carolina.

He also made friends with people in a machine shop in Brooklyn, and he would

to the machine shop frequently and just hang out there because he was fascinated

about how things were made, not just what they were, but how do you make

What are the machines that make the things that people use? And he was

fascinated by that, probably made quite a pest of himself at the time.

He also was a rather introverted kid, bookish, spent a lot of time in the

Brooklyn Public Library.

became fascinated with firearms and firearms mechanisms and tried to learn

much as he could just from researching things, as well as mechanical

and mechanical processes.

So he was really, if you want to call it that, a self -taught engineer.

He was very much a lone wolf. He was very much, I can figure things out.

I'm on my own. I need to be on my own.

I don't have guidance from anybody. And the people that are trying to tell me

what to do really don't know what they're talking about. So I'm going to

my way.

And that he did.

And he showed a lot of promise as a gun designer early on. And that was

recognized. And he went on from there.

Years ago, we used to have a 10 -year club.

Any employee who had been here at least 10 years would get to go to a dinner,

and it was a pretty big affair.

And this is a souvenir of one of those dinners.

This is an example of something that would have been given away. This is a

anniversary 44 carbine coin.

with the Ruger emblem on it.

This was one of the early boxes used to

ship the pistols.

One of the few things that we still ship here in Southport are auction guns,

which are guns that are rare, either shipped many years ago and out of

production or never launched.

This example is

A pistol that was bid on by someone and successfully purchased it.

And now we're going to ship it to an FFL dealer who will deliver it to the

customer. The shipping department is actually one of the few things that has

remained the same as it was 50 years ago. Where we're standing here, this is

machinery.

Where those filing cabinets are, that was the polishing room.

and the polishing compound that they used would sometimes catch fire, but you

couldn't get the guys to get off their stools.

And all of this was all machinery.

These offices were not here. The tool room was here, which was open, and all

that was machinery.

It's been many years since we cleaned the place out from production, all the

machinery and everything else that was here and built these offices.

At this point, it's old hat to me.

But back then when we were doing it, it was a big deal.

All of these lines that you see on the floor, by the way, are all from back in

the day.

They either marked walkways or places where work would be stacked.

Did Bill ever come through here?

I'm sure he did. He came through everywhere.

He would come through, and he would talk to the fellas, and he would inspect the

work. I remember him coming through down our end, and he would just every once

in a while look at pieces of work, whether it was a cylinder or a stock in

assembly room or in the polishing department or the filers were down at

end. He never lost his feel for the beginning of

when he started.

I believe that he really had a keen interest in the product.

It was his baby.

All the products were his baby.

Anybody who comes from nothing and becomes a successful business person

has to have drive.

And he had the drive, he had the ideas. He started out making tools that looked

like firearms, and then he progressed to firearms.

He was very innovative, and he was always looking for good engineers,

the best raw material, and he wanted his products to be sturdy,

dependable, and affordable.

Well, I think the art factor of gunsmithing would be the fact that you

a very bad -looking piece of metal and polish it and

end up with a new look. Or you take stock that's been broken in half and

you replace it and make a new stock for it. That's the art form.

The mechanic form is everything internal.

But the art form is wood and metal.

We get a lot.

of stuff that looks really, really bad. And we end up making it look near new,

I think.

Customers are happy.

This is Zach. Zach is preparing an extension on a buttstock, making it

longer for a person who's 6 '4". Phil is working on a semi -auto Beretta,

one that failed to work.

Bill Ruger had a magnificent brain when it came to

manufacturing and design.

He was able to foresee way, way, way ahead of his time. You know, the

casting, he was spectacular.

He advanced this industry a lot.

These wax injection presses begin the process. We have to make a wax pattern

every casting.

that we propose to produce.

This tree of steel components is now ready to go to the abrasive saws where

the parts will be separated from the gate and runner.

Although these castings look like finished parts, they are in fact far

finished. For this purpose, we have hundreds of machine tools in our New

Hampshire and South Fork factories and long sequences of machine operations to

be performed.

before at least these major components can be called ready for assembly to a

finished firearm.

Because this process opens up so many design possibilities,

it makes possible for you as a shooter to find in a sporting goods department

store a better quality, a more interesting variety of firearms.

The company had been very successful for its early years because Bill Ruger was

one of these unique people in the firearms industry who, whatever he

make, people wanted it. He was like a Remington or a Browning. He was just a

brilliant guy.

But when Bill Ruger stepped down and later passed on, it couldn't be done

way anymore.

We actually had to make dramatic changes to the company.

The company had its peak under Bill Ruger right during Y2K when the company

shipped about 985 ,000 guns in one year.

Bill, I remember, of course, in the beginning that you were the designer and

draftsman, in fact, of the various early models.

But what is the situation today?

Well, I still take a great deal of...

active participation in all this engineering work but I don't spend the

weeks on the drawing board that I did at one time and this has become

fortunately unnecessary because of this closely knit design team that's been in

the job and working in the company for so many years you see and today with our

great mutual understanding of problems and objectives why

Everybody here is contributing in a major way to the solution of problems,

we work as a team. Full team effort. I would say so, yes.

I love to work things out on the kitchen table. I give a lot of thought at all

times to these matters. But if it weren't for the fact that there are men

who can immediately interpret this and reduce it to scale drawings and

mechanism, why, obviously, we'd have nowhere near the capacity we have.

at the present time and this engineering and effort is really the heart and soul

of the whole enterprise i came to ruger in september of 2006.

it just seemed like there was a lot of opportunity so i focused on bringing in

engineers asking everyone i could from wholesale distributors to retailers to

consumers to all our sales people and hunting guides to find out Anybody I

talk to who was familiar with firearms to find out what they'd like to see

make.

And from there, and with a few good hires on the engineering side, we got

off and going.

And we made our first major product introduction, I think, in the fall

of 07, in the late 90s and early 2000s.

We weren't allowed to sell anything more than 10 rounds in a magazine to anybody

other than the police or the military.

And that expired, I believe, in 2004. And here we were at the end of 2006.

And Chris was saying, well, why don't we sell some of these magazines to normal

distribution?

It's legal. People want it.

And finally, we started selling them.

And it turned out to be a big success.

Another big change we made was... We actually built product before telling

people we had it.

The tradition in the firearms industry was to do everything you could to get

cover of major gun magazines.

And then sometimes it might be two years before there were any quantities of the

product made. And the consumers would often blame the retailer and be angry

the retailer when really it was the manufacturer's fault.

We thought we were doing a good job having a couple of thousand guns ready

go.

And, of course, they just disappeared overnight.

I think they might have lasted one day, and there wasn't enough.

In subsequent product launches, we slowly worked our way up to, you know,

,000 to 3 and 4 and then 5, and then one time we finally launched a product with

10 ,000 guns, and they evaporated immediately.

And so that was a big change we initiated in the industry, and I think

our competitors started to follow us.

I think the lesson in some of these stories is...

Listen to your customer.

Ask them what they want. They were very clear about what they wanted.

And if it's ethical and legal and it's within your capacity to do it,

give the customer what they want, and they'll reward you with a growing

business.

Everything that we make is made in America. All our employees are U

It's important for us as a company. That's the way we started.

That's the way, you know, certainly as long as I'm here, we're going to stay.

And, you know, you walk through our factories, and you realize that we've

great Americans in every one of our factories. And one of the things I do

we hire a new salesperson, I always want them to spend time in our factories,

not only to understand the puts and takes on what the capabilities are of

products, but to meet our associates and for them to understand that, They're

counting on you, the sales rep in the field, to put their kids through

The folks that are working on a shop floor, working in an assembly cell, they

can't sell one more firearm on a Friday afternoon.

They can't make one more stop at a retail that's five miles past where I

to get to today.

But you can.

It's more than just saying, you know, made in the USA. It's really, it's

American jobs.

Closing a factory in America is more than just the mechanics of shutting it

down, moving jobs around, sourcing components from overseas, things like

It's people losing their livelihood.

That's why sometimes Ruber is a little more conservative.

We operate with no debt and a very strong balance sheet. We need to be

control our destiny without having to worry about big banks and whether they

want to lend to the firearms industry or not.

So, again, that's what keeps me up at night is really.

can I maintain the workflow for all 1 ,900 of those folks?

You know, no matter what curveballs we're thrown at by the market, I'd like

think that we can outmaneuver that by new products, production changes, and

navigate the ups and downs of this industry so that those folks continue to

a job at Ruger.

The people who want to work at Ruger are folks that want to grow and learn, but

also folks that really want to hold to our values and appreciate our values,

which our core values are teamwork, integrity, respect, and innovation.

So that's what we want is people who want to embrace that and grow with that.

And, you know, if we've got somebody that's not an ethical person, we don't

them on our team. No matter how good a designer they are, a salesperson,

got to be grounded with a solid moral ethical background to be part of our