Italian gunmaker Beretta launches proxy fight for US firearms giant Sturm, Ruger & Co.

The parent company of Italian gun manufacturer Beretta is launching a proxy fight to take control of Sturm, Ruger and Co., America’s largest firearms maker, sources familiar with the matter have told The Post.

Insiders said the 500-year-old European firm, which has built a 10% stake in Hartford, Conn.-based Ruger, wants to nominate four executives to join the nine-member board — a move designed to gain more control over the main US rival to Smith & Wesson.

Sources said the nominees included William Franklin Detwiler, managing partner of Fernbrook Capital Management; Mark DeYoung, the founding CEO of Vista Outdoor; Frederick Disanto, CEO of Ancora Holdings; and Michael Christodolou, the founder of Inwood Capital Management.
Ruger’s sales and share price have dropped in recent years. It is the major rival to US firm Smith & WessonBloomberg via Getty Images

A proxy fight is an unfriendly contest for control of a company in which a group of shareholders tries to convince other investors to vote out the current board of directors or management.

Any vote would likely take place at Ruger’s annual general meeting scheduled for May 29.

The clash has erupted amid a sales slump and plunging profits at Ruger, with the price of its shares cratering by over 40% in the past five years.

As of Wednesday’s close, Ruger’s market cap hovered at $581 million.

When Beretta first revealed an initial 9% stake in an October filing, it said that it wanted to explore “potential areas of operational and strategic collaborations” with Ruger.

The US firm then adopted a one-year shareholder rights plan amid concerns about a growing ownership stake accumulated by the Italian giant.

Such plans — often called “poison pills” — are aimed at making hostile takeovers more difficult by diluting the ownership of an acquiring investor that exceeds a specified threshold.

Beretta — an iconic gun manufacturer with ties to Italy’s Alpine region of Lombardy that was founded in 1526 — raked in $1.7 billion in revenue in 2024 and has been snapping up rivals like Switzerland’s RUAG Ammotec in 2022.

Pietro Gussalli Beretta, a 15th-generation heir to founder Bartolomeo Beretta, steers the company, which has its corporate headquarters in Luxembourg.

It has been seeking a greater presence in the US, which has the world’s largest legal firearms market, owing to the Second Amendment.

The Post has sought comment from Beretta and Ruger.

‘minor threats’. Phlogistonic propaganda

Missouri Supreme Court opens door to using deadly force in self-defense, even over minor threats

Missouri’s “stand your ground” law allows a person to use physical force “to the extent he or she reasonably believes such force to be necessary to defend himself or herself.”

[no it doesn’t. SYG means you are not required to flee from where you’re at. An idiot and biased take from whoever wrote this at NPR]

An earlier appellate decision said deadly force, like using a firearm or a knife, can be used to protect yourself against death, injury or assault, if the force is reasonable. Prosecutors fear the ruling will affect victims of violent crimes and could make meaningless the state’s Castle Doctrine, a version of “stand your ground” laws.

[where the NPR news writer came up with that idiot take, I haven’t a clue either, as the ‘Castle Doctrine’ also isn’t implicated in the case. This is a pure Use of Force in Self Defense case]

An appellate court ruling that critics say will broaden when people can use deadly force as a self-defense will now remain in effect after the Missouri Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

With the Tuesday refusal of Danielle Lechocki’s case, a November ruling by the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District, will stand. The decision was decried by a state prosecutors group as greatly expanding the state’s self-defense law so far that people could justify using deadly force even over a minor threat.

The case involved Lechocki’s use of a knife when she felt “extremely threatened” by another woman during an altercation outside a veterans’ homeless shelter in 2022. A Warren County judge denied Lechocki’s request to use self-defense to justify her actions, agreeing with the prosecutor who argued that deadly force cannot be used to repel a simple assault and battery.

The jury ultimately found Lechocki guilty of attempted unlawful use of a weapon but acquitted her of fourth-degree assault. Lechocki was sentenced to two days in jail and a fine of $1,000.

With the high court’s ruling, Lechocki’s conviction was overturned and the case may return to the county, said Christian Lehmberg, Lechocki’s public defender on the appeal. The judge unfairly prevented the jury from hearing her defense, Lehmberg said.

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Firearm industry ‘responsible controls’ legislation is existential threat to gun owners

Anti-gun activists think they have figured out a way around the Second Amendment, democratic accountability, and the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) to impose a limitless raft of gun control on the American people.

The strategy is to enact what civilian disarmament advocates term “firearm industry responsibility” laws in anti-gun states. These laws impose a duty on members of the firearms industry to institute “reasonable controls” over the sale and distribution of their products, on top of the mountains of explicit state and federal statutes and regulations they are tasked to comply with, lest they face ruinous civil liability.

The term “reasonable controls” is vague and ill-defined, resulting in the decidedly unreasonable circumstance where gun industry members can’t know how to comply with the law. These statutes empower anti-gun government officials to abuse the vague language in a manner that imposes ever-expanding restrictions on the industry and its customers, limited only by the officials’ imagination. Moreover, this legislation impacts not just firearms dealers, manufacturers, and distributors as they would be understood under federal law, but includes any business involved in the stream of commerce for ammunition or any other firearm-related products.

The goal is to use the threat of devastating civil liability to force the firearms industry to restrict the rights of themselves and their customers by instituting gun controls that were not enacted (and often rejected) through the democratic process and may be found unconstitutional if imposed directly by government. The entire enterprise is a grotesque and cynical evasion of democratic accountability and constitutional review.

Thus far, 10 states have enacted versions of this legislation, with extremist gun control advocates in Virginia also seeking to enact a variant (HB21) at present.

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The Graveyard of Destructive Ideas.

Elite fashions harden into dogma, dissent becomes taboo, institutions fall in line—and only when reality intrudes does yesterday’s madness begin its overdue collapse.

How do destructive ideas and bouts of collective madness so quickly become policy, law, and the status quo? After all, most have little public support—and are not Western nations supposedly rationally governed?

There is usually a multi-step process on the road to these self-destructive fits of society-wide insanity.

The suicidal impulse so often begins with left-leaning researchers in elite universities (i.e., the tenured in search of a novel, grant-getting theory). They begin insisting that a new existential threat requires immediate government intervention, novel legislation, ample funding, and public awareness of the impending danger.

So out of nowhere, the public is warned that the scorching planet will be inundated by rising seas in a mere decade. Or that millions of transgender youth are our next civil rights frontier, given that they suffer in silence without political advocacy, new laws, programs, and the chance for “life-saving,” powerful hormonal treatments and radical sex-reassignment surgeries. Indeed, the travel time from an outlandish idea by the faculty lounge to liberal status quo is a mere few years.

Next, the media, hand-in-glove with academia, springs into action to persuade the skeptical public to “follow the science” and “trust the experts.” It castigates any doubters as cranks or “conspiracy theorists” who spread “disinformation” and “misinformation”; or as racists, nativists, sexists, homophobes, and transphobes who must be silenced.

Hollywood and sports celebrities often piggyback on the frenzy, hijacking awards ceremonies and pre-game national anthems to out-virtue-signal each other, warning the public that they must adapt and change—or else!

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Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.
— LORD THOMAS MACAULAY

Evidence-Free Hackery: Another Highly Respected ‘Expert’ On the Alleged Conflict of Guns and Public Safety

Crucial Concealment Covert IWB holster open carry Dan Z. for SNW

Oh look…a Robert Spitzer op-ed. Let’s take a look and see what kind of brilliant insights this very respected expert has for us. He is, after all, an academic that antigun courts take super-seriously. The article’s headline itself — What Happens When the Second Amendment Collides With Public Safety? — is based on a false premise. The reality is, the Second Amendment right to carry need not ever collide with “public safety.”

Especially in the context of the Pretti shooting, Spitzer seems to implicitly accept the argument made by some administration officials (and Trump himself) that the mere act of carrying at a protest means you are asking to be shot by police.

This fraught political moment has thus found the Trump administration in the uncomfortable position of taking criticism from both liberals who blame heavy-handed federal agent tactics and conservatives who bristle at the administration’s seeming abandonment of public gun carry rights.

On the one hand, civilian gun carry is indeed a right under the Second Amendment according to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the Bruen case where the high court said that individuals have a “right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” The court proposed no exception for doing so in a public gathering.

Spitzer says carry is indeed a right “according to the Supreme Court.” Interesting. I thought it was because the plain text of the Second Amendment says we have a right to bear arms, which all relevant historical sources confirm is a reference to public carry.

If you ever wondered why an “expert” like Spitzer (and the other usual suspects) always takes the side of the government in gun rights litigation, you can start with the fact that they clearly don’t believe the Second Amendment protects an individual right at all.

On the other hand, the consequences of such action are clear. Public gun carrying, especially in the context of a public demonstration or similar gathering is, no matter the intentions of the carrier, a terrible idea.

I should have included the very next paragraph. He basically concedes carry is a right (because SCOTUS said so), but then says it’s a terrible idea to exercise that right.

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Missouri? Well, yes.

As West Virginia Machine Gun Sales Bill Makes Waves, Who Else Might Pass Similar Measure?

As we noted on Monday, a bill from Gun Owners of America introduced in West Virginia would allow political entities to sell machine guns to the public. There’s nothing I can think of that would be illegal in this measure, and it would do a whole lot to increase the number of full-auto weapons in the market, thus potentially driving down prices.

But my question is, just who else might go down this road?

I’m sure a lot of pro-gun legislators may look at this and think about introducing it in their states, but introducing bills is the easy part. Getting them passed is where it gets tricky.

So, assuming that it’ll pass in West Virginia–and looking at their makeup, that’s a strong possibility–where else might it pass?

At the top of the list would have to be Missouri. They’ve tried nullifying all gun control laws from the federal government, which would include the National Firearms Act. Clearly, they don’t mind lawful citizens owning machine guns.

Because this doesn’t violate federal law, at least so far as I can see, I could see an enterprising Missouri lawmaker introducing a version of this bill and it actually passing. It’s not like they’re not looking for more ways to be pro-gun, and this is a great way to make that happen.

Wyoming seems to be doing all it can to follow in similar footsteps, so I could see them passing this as well. The same is true of both Dakotas, which seem to be pretty pro-gun.

Montana would be another possibility.

An interesting prospect would be New Hampshire. Its “live free or die” motto is often reflected in its gun laws. It’s one of the best in the nation as things currently stand, so I couldn’t rule out this one making the cut there. However, I also see it being a much tougher fight than we’re likely to see in West Virginia.

Then, of course, let’s look at some ostensibly pro-gun states where there’s not a snowball’s chance in Lucifer’s living room of it passing.

One is, unfortunately, my home state of Georgia.

While we’ve gotten some pro-gun measures passed of late, the tide may well be shifting on that. Plus, we have a lot of Republican lawmakers who are way too squishy on gun rights. They might not want to pass gun control, but they’re not interested in upsetting the status quo, either, and selling machine guns to Georgia residents is probably enough to give them an aneurysm.

Let’s not even talk about Florida. “The Gunshine State” won’t even let legal adults under 21 buy a shotgun for home defense, so there’s no way they’ll sell machine guns to law-abiding citizens.

I can also see it not quite making the cut in Alabama, which recently passed a law that mirrored the feds on illegal machine guns. It’s likely untenable for those lawmakers to decry machine guns one year, then a couple of years later, start selling them to people. It’s a different matter entirely, of course, but politics is often more about perception than reality.

So I’m going to be watching what happens in West Virginia going forward, and it’ll be interesting to see who else jumps to follow.