Cerberus continued without him. Wow, lot of work went into this one. The gun cultures objection to conglomeration was reminiscent of objections Id once heard from conscious consumers when Unilever had purchased Ben & Jerrys. For several values of they, as we say in the nerd-pool. While the guns were being sorted, a hand written list of which guns were under whose ownership was compiled. Brittinghams mistake, along with cutting a deal with jerks, is orchestrating a sale when he wanted a cash infusion & channel resale relationship. Feinberg picked Trump. 3. In early 2016, Donald Trump unexpectedly decapitated the Republican Party, and GOP power brokers were forced to choose sides. It currently owns the Albertsons supermarket empire and previously owned the Alamo and National car-rental chains. Its nice to see the innovator and underdog in the market smack the big lazy dog that was trying some underhanded crap. SilencerShop 5 yr. ago. Sounds like a pretty toxic environment to work in. I wonder why he couldnt just hire someone to fix their paper work and compliance issues. Brittingham, the founder of Advanced Armament Corporation, currently holds more than 40 patents in the firearms industry. Jason Schauble didnt see this as problematic, so long as Kevin maintained proper control and dominion over the guns as per ATF regulations and federal law. It has owned a water park in Texas and a television station in Salt Lake City. His goals this time aren't acquisition as the measure of success. Early Life And Career Of Eric Brittingham Eric was born on 8th May 1960 in Maryland. . Ill spare you the details (it gets pretty dry), but here are the judges own words on the compliance officer: [The compliance officer] was never intended to be a compliance person at best, he was unqualified to ensure appropriate compliance; at worst, he was sent to AAC to find a basis to terminate Brittingham. What the ATF requires can be handled in a separate file. Wed get after-action reports from the front lines, saying these tactics saved us, or this medical training saved us, with details, Reichert said. He still is a gun guy. I expect many of you to do the same. Im kinda leery of both of them know. Its basically a non-story. She currently lives in a mansion worth $5 million. The judge described it as an act of defiance and not a binding signature. While the star has a current net worth of $1.5 million, it appears she may not have nearly as much as fans think. Realizing that AAC would not be able to function without using Kevins personal guns for R&D, the deal allowed time for those guns to remain on premises while the transfer was taking place. On one floor are the hedge funds, trading in distressed debt and residential mortgages. The network has reportedly instituted a soft ban on Trump, a huge problem for his campaign and for Fox News if the policy backfires. No thanks! He had used these as tools to test new silencer designs, and since he owned the company he never saw the need to officially transfer the guns to AAC or buy replacements. . The boom was short-lived: The 2014 rollout of a new pistol, the Remington R51, was a disaster an unreliable shooter with serious production flaws, the R51 was the Galaxy Note of the firearms industry, and Remington ended up recalling the guns. PLCAA granted gunmakers broad immunity from lawsuits from victims of gun violence. A free market is better than the centrally controlled and redistributive alternatives, but it doesnt have a benevolent hand like some sort of benign deity. At Cerberus, he talked firearms often, once derailing a Freedom Group board meeting with a discussion of the relative ballistic merits of polymer-cased ammunition and traditional hollow-points. Money was mentioned but that seems to have been to build consensus rather than the reason. However, Kevin was a gun guy. [T]he time is now to consider before we double down on our investment of a lot of our personal capital getting him his title and $$ back and enduring his inability to work within our system. The opposite of rule of law is anarchy. 17.5k Followers, 1,349 Following, 3,347 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Kevin Brittingham (@kevinbrittingham) [3] In early 2015 AAC moved locations from Lawrenceville, Georgia to a new, larger, state of the art facility in Huntsville, Alabama. Fortunately for him, at least there was one thing that always, infallibly, drove gun sales through the ceiling: a mass shooting. Shall not be infringed seems pretty straight forward from a pro-2a standpoint. I think I can build and test a few for less than 10K but biz stuff will bring the most cost I am sure. What youd have instead are forced monopolies and whatnot. I guess we ll have to agree to disagree LOL. He confirmed via text message that the silencer in question was indeed a Maxim, but he maintains that it was sent by Freedom Group to set him up. Its part of campaign to smoke out and then attack unpopular Republican cuts. Tier 1 Group was profitable, but its sales maxed out at around $15 million annually a fraction of a percent of Cerberuss total business. Well what experience do you have building and running a tech company? Wealthy and free, actually. Several people I spoke to said Cerberus had extracted enough cash from Remington during the good years to meet the firms threshold rate of return, and so, in a narrow sense, the investment was a victory. Remington eventually sent a single person to iron out the compliance issues, in the form of a former private investigator with a few days of ATF training and no background in compliance whatsoever. Using a technique employed by Special Forces operators, he then taped these magazines together into bundles of three, allowing for immediate reload. Yep. I have little sympathy for any of the players. This was set up as a means of getting pretext charges against gangsters who were fond of the military grade hardware of the age. Kevin Brittingham was quoted as saying he hoped FG jacked him around until the money went to his grandkids, because they are required to pay 9% interest on it. H&R 1871 The US Navy Special Warfare Group approached us shortly after Remington had purchased Advanced Armament from me. its above the asking price he wants/needs). A comprehensive new government study concludes that the illness probably wasnt caused by foreign adversaries. The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution. David Mamet. Rather than selling out to the Freedomless Group he should have hired a couple people to straighten the mess out. No insult intended to Brittingham, but I suspect he would have preferred to have done things differently and avoided all of this in hindsight. Guys like Steve Feinberg live in a different world than Dick Dyke, he told me. Throw into that confusion the fact that the R&D department was using some of Kevins personal firearms as design aides and you can see where there was a lot of potential for disaster.. I really, really like that quote. Cerberus manages an enormous amount of money more than $30 billion from several floors in a midtown office building on 52nd Street and Third Avenue. Lesson here is, if you own a company and have another, larger company come in an help, you dont own your company anymore. Simple answer: its not his company anymore, and it wasnt the day he sold ownership and went from employer to employee. Scummy business practices that too many companies engage in these days, and why I cant side with the bullshit free marketeers who want places like that to have no laws or regulations controlling their bullshit. This despite Kevin meeting and exceeding his stated performance goal (growing the company by over 100%, more than the amount required by the employment agreement). Accounting for enforcement is particularly important when the system in which you operate is powerful, complex or arcane, so working the system can pay off better than doing the work. This entire mess wouldve been non-existent had they not had to contend with ATF compliance.. management into systems influenced by lobbyists and activists. If that isnt the deal you want, dont make the deal. The exception was Richard Dyke, who conceded a single point. He joined him on one of his elk-hunting jaunts and described the billionaire as an ordinary, down-to-earth American. Feinberg even offered to fly Reichert to California for a consultation with a leading plastic surgeon regarding his still-disfigured face. This kind of organizational nonsense will come out in the products eventually. He likes guns. Um, ever heard of Microsoft Windows? Reichert sensed Feinberg was doing this out of a sense of patriotism. The two were both pseudo-populist billionaires from New York, but otherwise dissimilar. It has owned a school-bus manufacturer, a chain of bowling alleys, and a Japanese bank. The judge thinks that Kevin might have been after some personal firearms as well, but Kevin says he just wanted to grab his personal effects when he was suspended previously, Remington didnt even let him grab his kids backpack before being thrown out of the building. Reminds me of a conversation I had with a young man who is a sophomore at Penn, was basically convinced of the proposition that unless it is illegal, it is fair game. At court, it came out that the only person on Remingtons side who could sign the employment agreements and make them valid never did. The owners and investors involved are strong supporters of the Second Amendment and are avid hunters and shooters. Two years later, three Freedom Group executives gave a million dollars each to the NRA. PARKER GUNMAKERS His interests include aquatic ecology, biodiversity, wetland ecology, wetland restoration, and entomology. Nowhere is the lab-leak debate more personal than among the experts investigating the origins of COVID. His desire for quick results is masked by a constitutional equanimity: Several Cerberus insiders told me Feinberg never raises his voice, even when he is calling for someones head. On November 16th 2011, Jason Schauble was plotting Kevins final demise. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. The lawsuit over the faulty Remington trigger mechanism had forced the company to offer another recall, this time for more than 7.5 million units, and the firm ended up losing more than $135 million in a single year, for a net profit margin of minus 17 percent. Good read though. I could teach anyone how to do this with a properly sighted gun in five minutes. Gravity was a constant, and one could consult a table to calculate the trajectory. Youre dumb, because Im not talking about Remington and I indicated it was a tangent for a reason. For a horrifyingly long period of time Marlin levergun quality control was bad enough that the end products were fairly described as vaguely gun-shaped objects that should never have shipped. In reality, there had never been any cause for termination. Shocked! In reality the $200 stamp was a near defacto ban on new ownership. Can you name a bullshit free marketer who opposes the sanctity of private contracts? Add a Comment. Cerberus put up the capital, purchasing a shooting range on the outskirts of Memphis for Tier 1s facilities, a sprawling 800-acre private military base with a half-dozen shooting ranges, on-road and off-road driving courses, a parachute-drop zone, and an urban-combat compound designed to look like an Afghan village. Q&A With Kevin Brittingham, the Most Radical Guy in Guns Tactical-Life 68.6K subscribers Subscribe 10K views 3 years ago Tactical Life gets some rare face time with one of the more unique. Jason wanted AAC to be treated like another plant, like Remington or Marlin or Bushmaster, with Remington HQ as the head of operations. For a time, it was the largest landlord in the city. Kevin tried to negotiate the terms of the agreement, but there were no changes. As it should be, but it gets complicated when control changes or theres nebulous IP or physical property rights. Its play was obvious: roll up small gun companies, centralize management while combining costs and cutting overhead, and then, when the moment was right, sell the conglomerate to the public via an IPO. The first was the absolute wreckage they made of Marlin and the damage done to Marlins employees and above all quality control. The Californians have been booted from Frogmore Cottage because the king (or the character invented by the U.K. press) has had enough of their abuse. Can you name a bullshit free marketer who opposes the sanctity of private contracts?. You post as if free market and equitable rule of law are opposites. Never, ever take a buy-out package that is contingent upon you, the founder, still being there at some date in the future. The margins on them were superb. Centerfire pistol caliber suppressors include the Ti-Rant series and Illusion9 the only true eccentric designed suppressor to utilize factory sights as well as allowing the use of rail mounted accessories on the host firearm, both of which use an interchangeable piston system in their Nielsen device. The potential cost savings to be realized by consolidating these operations into a single, modern factory were substantial. What with the general availability of 20-30 cap mags for accurate semiautomatic weapons its debatable whether even the remaining pool is practically more useful than the much larger pool of ar15s, AKs, FALsetc. Novelty sells in this business more than tactical improvements, he told me. Freedom Group marketed its firearms not just as guns but as shooting platforms: modular, lethal Lego sets whose component parts could be updated for years after the initial purchase. COPYRIGHT 2021, THETRUTHABOUTGUNS.COM. Then he shot himself in the head. This story reads like everybody hearing what they wanted to hear. Thanks, Nick. Ya aint gonna run across Billy Graham in these small companies. That same year, Remingtons annual sales fell almost 35 percent from its post-Newtown peak, even as Remingtons public competitors outperformed. The latter excels at the turnaround, acquiring struggling businesses, implementing management fixes, cutting overhead, and flipping them for a profit. He was joined in this request by the California State Teachers Retirement System, a key Cerberus investor and one of the largest pension funds in the country, which threatened to pull its money from the firm if it didnt divest from its gun investments. Feinberg downplayed his wealth; Trump exaggerated his. [25], Integrally suppressed rimfire firearms (discontinued), Last edited on 16 February 2023, at 06:54, Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division, "Freedom Group, Inc. Forms Office of the Chief Executive Officer", https://cdn0.thetruthaboutguns.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/27092020123649821_1231_20202709124853872.pdf, "Hanna Announces Remington Receives $80 Million Contract", Army's XM2010 sniper rifle gets full fielding, "The Quiet Continues: Suppressed Pistols", "Advanced Armament Corp Awarded Contract for Family of Muzzle Brakes", "300 AAC Blackout, New Caliber, New Mission", "Frank Girardot: It's Time to Get One of Those "I Voted" Stickers", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Advanced_Armament_Corporation&oldid=1139661252. Not that it matters to me pragmatically. After the jury found Murdaugh guilty of murdering his wife and son, he was given two consecutive life sentences. Anyone who has been around small businesses knows that they are hornets nest of incompetence, greed and outright fraud. This push for efficiency meant laying off skilled workers, introducing manufacturing defects into Freedom Group products. Not going to purchase anything under the FG banner. They told him that he had been fired for cause and that he could return if and only if he signed a document saying that he admitted fault, agreed to a lower pay (previously $250,000/year), and was on probation for a year during which they could fire him without notice. Feinberg, an avid elk hunter, was one of his better pupils. He is said to be Cerberus Capitals largest investor and reinvests most of his earnings back into his funds. As 2012 came to a close, Cerberuss gun play was nearly seven years old ripe enough for an exit. He envisions a company with 50 people run with real leadership. These were class 2 and 3 items, SBRs and full autos. Navy seals, Army Rangers, and other elite military operatives trained there in preparation for clandestine missions across the globe. And he did get $10 million up front, so its not like hes having to collect aluminum cans in parking lots to feed his kids.. Good to see Kevin get what he deserves. The sale landed Juan and Robert on The Forbes 400 as a family entry with a combined net worth of about half a billion dollars. TAPCO The tax stamp was equivalent to about $2,000 in todays money, easily pricing the average citizen out of such purchases. Dont look at it as who gets your money. What set the expert shooter apart was the ability to read the wind. . For the sake of argument (and the edification of someone who has neither sold computers nor wrangled an FFL), whats the difference?. I would have been more comfortable with the people. Thats possible, but the kinds of connections you needed to persuade the Feds to bail out your bad auto-industry bet for $30 billion were more readily available to graduates of Princeton than UC-Irvine. The conclusion of the decision is pretty awesome to read, and I recommend you do it in full. DAKOTA ARMS If you dont want to work for a bunch of hide-bound morons who spend their days filling out TPS reports, then dont accept a buy-out offer from a company that promised you how TPS reports are going to cure all your record-keeping problems. All this intrigue sounds like a bunch of bitchy college girls. Emily Kohrs didnt do anything wrong, and the medias harsh treatment of the Fulton County foreperson was a gift to Trumps lawyers. Of course it didnt stay that way. By the end of his second day, he was consistently hitting targets from a thousand yards away the equivalent of 11 city blocks. Sales of the R-15 boomed. Honestly the revenue and sale of business dollars here are at the bottom end of business. Brittingham needed (and maybe still needs) better business advisers to point out stuff like this. Ive skipped over a lot of detail. Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. FGIs management are not gun guys. Theyre a bunch of Wall Street parasites. Salary in 2021. Im shocked. Right-wing board to clamp down on woke ideology in cartoons. Look, I grew up in rural America, he said. Freedom also benefited from broad growth in the American gun market. But Scott Blackwell at Freedom Group told him in no uncertain terms that AAC would remain a separate entity.. Just read your analysis and also read the decision. They saw through the Ponzi scheme. If we terminate [Brittingham] at our discretion before the end of his year, we might lose Lynsey [manager at AAC and co-plaintiff in the suit]and we might lose Robert [Silvers, R&D genius and 300 BLK designer], and we might get sued, but we will keep a lot of other people and Ill personally go down there and put people in place that will endure in the longer term and continue to grow this business. PARA USA One example is the migration of the Activision guys through Microsoft, then into Smith and Tinker (which eventually didnt work, exactly.). They are in bed with government (including the odious State of NY) on numerous levels. It is important to point out that at the time this email was written, Remington and Freedom Group had no knowledge that Kevin had done anything wrong. If you have cash flow issues so bad theyll take the company down, you dont have a company any more. A year later, Cerberus bought Bushmaster for $76 million from Richard Dyke, the companys founder. I have been working on a few designs and would not even need $50,000 to get a working product. In 2012, his daughter Lindsey posted a picture of her fathers T-shirt to Instagram. . You should make the effort to get at least one hot-shot lawyer on your side. The president surprised and angered some Democrats by declining to veto a GOP effort to block a D.C. bill. Im not arguing that. "The Mini-Fix in .300 Blackout will be the next." Why would I say that about Somalia? Then he went to Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot his way into the school, killing six adults and 20 schoolchildren, all with the Bushmaster, in less than ten minutes. were clearly treating this as an owned property, another plant in their portfolio, with Brittingham another employee. Nevertheless, even before it could be determined whether this was Kevins personal silencer or if it was for R&D at the company, Kevin was suspended. Disabling a security camera to remove disputed items from your place of employment is a shady act. Freedom Groups customers were buying, often at a premium, field-tested military gear. So now youve got tens possibly hundreds of NFA items being transferred between, moved around, and otherwise commingled by the original owner and a company with two different FFLs any one of which may or may not technically be in constructive possession of those item(s) at any given time. There's Robby Johnson as overall VP, Ethan Lessard to VP of Engineering . With the help of some decent legal counsel, hell continue to be an innovator, and he won his case against corporate big wig a$$holes. But if all people were basically good, why would we, increasingly, pass more and more elaborate laws? Muhammad hadnt purchased his Bushmaster legally; hed stolen it from a gun store. Although the PLCAA granted immunity from lawsuits of this type, lawmakers had left an exception: negligent entrustment. This term referred to the rights of victims to sue gun dealers who had sold weapons irresponsibly say, to a customer who was obviously drunk or homicidal. But after a meeting with Jason Schauble (then working for Remington, recently fired from Tracking Point, and now working for SilencerCo), Kevin saw that Remington might be able to help them grow the business beyond what they could do on their own. He claims that one of the AAC employees brought them over and that he wasnt even present for the photo shoot. The companys corporate culture is Darwinian. Tracking the name, title, department, location(s) etc of some 5000+ people is certainly larger in scope than a collection of even several hundred firearms and accessories. By March 2012, Nardelli was gone. RELATED STORY The Fix by Q: Exclusive Look at One of the World's Most Innovative Rifles Kevin Brittingham, Radical CEO "I think the gun industry overall is very boring. Precisely this. Stuff like this makes me not so sure. During the shoot a number of guns were used which Freedom Group claims were Kevins personal firearms, but Kevin denies this claim. Really. He was summarily fired for guns that either werent actually his or were being legitimately used for R&D purposes being in the shop, and that was a breach of the contract from Freedom Groups end. During the flood of grief that followed, an outcry erupted directed at Cerberus, Remington, and Bushmaster. Kevin Brittingham founded Advanced Armament Corporation in 1994 to manufacture sound suppressors, having previously been a distributor for GEMTECH, another suppressor manufacturer. These dimensions allow the 300 AAC Blackout to be used in existing magazines designed for M16 or AR-15 rifles. So you have one failed business buying an out of control business. I think it says that Jason wanted AAC to be a separate P&L and the President of Remington wanted it to be another plant. He interviews some pretty major players in the industry. The final court decision has been issued in the case of Kevin Brittinghams lawsuit against Freedom Group and Remington over his sudden firing a couple years back, and its a way better read than I expected. 4. Theres a very good readable breakdown in this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Short-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393338827/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390243182. REMINGTON 1816, Theres a hard product version of Conways law: Any software system reflects the organization that created it. (There are variations on the exact quote. Signing a contract with the word flounder in such a way that it appears as a signature on casual inspection is not an upstanding move either. Reichert obliged, dragging his pupil into the swamps near the Camp LeJeune base. Like concealed carry laws that followed, they were supposedly never intended to be applied to John q publicjust the bad element. Of note, one of AAC's chief suppressor designers is Robert Silvers, creator of the PhotoMosaic. Careful. It is the same company. Remington is corporatist. During this time, as court documents showed, Kevin had succeeded in pissing off Freedom Group to the extent that they were actively looking for a reason to fire him. . One major legal case challenged the NFA, and would have been successful save for a technicality causing the plaintiff to drop/abandoned the action. Once you start dealing fit 7 digits in front of the decimal point, everyone is a scumbag. When some buyer of your company says that their back-office IT systems can benefit you, thats a sure sign that theyre going to quash your culture. HOW MANY multi year rolloutS of 10k desktops? Now add FG, who is coming in, buying the company with the two FFLs, and which may be taking possession of some of those NFA itemsand you have a huge problem. Plenty of viable (and more desirable) alternatives to give my hard earned money to. There was no disguising its military heritage, but by stamping a storied brand onto this menacing instrument, Cerberus was able to expand Freedom Groups business in both the traditional gun-store market and the family-friendly sporting retailers. $1 Million - $5 Million. That warning never took place, and no time was given. Instead, the purchasers tended to be seasoned gun collectors with large arsenals. In 2015, Walmart announced it would no longer carry assault rifles. But instead of ceasing operation until they had everything figured out under their own FFL, they continued using Kevin Brittinghams personal and business FFLs and simply rubber stamping his name on the forms. My choices of suppressors is getting short. It was easy to imagine these well-armed individuals as doomsday preppers or anti-government fanatics, but the reality, one former Cerberus insider suggested, was mundane. This page was last edited on 16 February 2023, at 06:54. Kary's increased presence on social . I used to sell THOUSANDS of computers and somehow we managed to keep track of each and every machine, what it had installed, every card and all the associated history, even what location at the customer it was in. Now the retirees are finding out that they worked for decades at far below the rate that they thought they were getting. Too much can go wrong and stuff can just end up walking out of the door. This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. Oh, slow quarter since this years economy crashed? During a press conference, the mayor said his words about not believing in the separation of church and state were just his own beliefs. Nearby Blackwater, he felt, had a much better setup. This meant transferring all existing equipment to Remingtons possession, along with all of their silencers and R&D guns. LeeAnne Locken - $2.5 Million Moral of the story, dont get involved with freedom group. Indeed, it seems the more powerful the system, the more coverage and leeway for jerks. When Adam Lanza shot his mother, Nancy, in her sleep on the morning of December 14, 2012, he used one of her bolt-action rifles, a Savage Mark II. Kary admitted to fellow castmate, Brandi Redmond that without her husband, Eduardo Brittingham, she would not have much to .
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