Americans and Europeans called 1816 the “Year Without Summer.” Thanks to the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora a year earlier, global temperatures plummeted. Heavy snow fell on Albany, New York, in June.
That bitterly cold 1816 — the last full year of James Madison’s presidency — was also the year that Remington, the nation’s oldest gun manufacturer, set up shop in Ilion, New York, a tiny village on the Mohawk River west of Albany.
Alas, in late 2023, union leaders learned that RemArms, which acquired the Remington facility in 2020, would close its Ilion plant and relocate to the greener pastures of Georgia, leaving displaced workers and village officials to mourn the loss.
“Two hundred and eight years of history. Gone, gone,” Ilion Mayor John P. Stephens said, according to The New York Times.
Jim Conover, who began with Remington in 1964 and retired four decades later as a production manager, echoed the mayor’s sadness.
“When Remington leaves, it’s not going to be like a facility leaving, it’s going to be like part of your family has moved off,” Conover said, according to the Associated Press.
The AP also noted that a lawsuit and bankruptcy following the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, helped cripple the company, which lost approximately 1,000 workers in the last decade.
In early December, the Utica Observer-Dispatch in Utica, New York, obtained the letter RemArms sent to union officials. That letter announced the impending plant closure and gave reasons for it.
“The Company expects that operations at the Ilion Facility will conclude on or about March 4, 2024. The Company did not arrive at this decision lightly,” the letter read in part.
Will more businesses flee New York?
Among other things, the company’s letter cited “an environment in Georgia that supports and welcomes the firearms industry.”
At the time, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York immediately grasped one of that line’s obvious meanings.
“It is because of New York Democrats’ unconstitutional gun grab policies that the oldest gun manufacturer in the country has been run out of the state,” Stefanik said in a statement.
Indeed, New York’s tyrannical gun-control efforts have even brought rebuke from the U.S. Supreme Court.
For instance, in the 2022 Bruen case — an opinion drafted by Justice Clarence Thomas — SCOTUS ruled 6-3 that a draconian New York firearms licensing requirement violated both the Second Amendment and the 14th Amendment.
Only liberal Democrats could find a way to trample multiple constitutional amendments at once.
In December, three elected Republicans in New York state also released a statement on the RemArms plant closure.
“Unfortunately, like we have seen all too often in New York, burdensome regulations, crippling taxes and problematic energy and other policies continue to force businesses and companies to flee the state, taking jobs and livelihoods with them,” the statement read in part, according to the Observer-Dispatch.
New York’s anti-business environment became even more hostile following Judge Arthur Engoron’s ludicrous fine against former President Donald Trump. Last week, the unhinged judge ordered Trump to pay a $350 million fine in a victimless and politically-motivated fraud case.
Anti-Trump New Yorkers celebrated Engoron’s tyrannical ruling, but they might soon have cause to regret it. For instance, pro-Trump truckers already have pledged to boycott New York City because of the verdict.
Meanwhile, blue-state workers such as those left behind in Ilion will suffer most from liberal Democrats’ madness.
Still, perhaps those workers should take comfort. After all, should another volcanic eruption send global temperatures plummeting, liberals surely will have a plan to raise them again.
