Armalite sells out gun owners and gets unwanted national publicity

The Police Loophole is doing a great job, alongside An NC Gun Blog, of detailing the growing list of companies refusing business from police or government agencies in states such as New York which have enacted onerous restrictions on their residents.  That list now stands at nearly seventy and is growing almost exponentially.

An then there’s Illinois’ Armalite.

One of their sales reps, Pat Raley, sent a caustic reply to one gun owner asking if Armalite would join these other companies in declining sales to New York State.

Dear concerned gun owner,

First of all I would like to say thank you for filling my email with all this spam email.

Second, I am not sure where you got this blanket email from to send out as spam, but please stop it.

Third, The manufacture is not the one you need to convince.

You need to convince the law enforcement agencies and the common people about their mistake in electing these officials and have them removed. Again NOT the manufacture.

AR Stands for ArmaLite…

Respectfully,

Pat Raley
raleyp@armalite.com

Then their president, Mark Westrom, pictured above, published two damage-control posts “clarifying” the salesman’s asinine reply.

All he did was succeed in digging the hole MUCH deeper.

His posts on the issue can be summed up in one line:

2. We do not halt sales to individual officers even in problematic states.

Quisling.

He’s not going to halt sales to individual officers who will enforce these onerous and unconstitutional laws aimed at disarming gun owners who were law-abiding before this year.

Ironically, cops in New York State are not exempt from the new law, nor can they get special consideration because they are cops.

Armalite’s position has earned that company millions of dollars in negative publicity as the story has gone national.  It’s even been picked up on the Drudge Report.

Here’s one of many stories and commentaries bouncing around about Armalite.  With publicity like this, you don’t need any enemies…

Armalite tries to play both sides of the developing gun war

by Bob Owens

It’s a simple matter of sanitation: you don’t sh*t where you eat.  That common-sense message was apparently lost on firearms manufacturer Armalite.

…In other words, Armalite is trying to play both ends against the middle. They want to say they are on-board with the boycott (sort of) to placate gun owners, but they aren’t; they’re still going to continue selling to individual police officers… just not to the departments.

Armalite will sell to every individual officer in the department that wants an AR-15, but they won’t sell to the department’s official purchasing agent. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

Westrom’s policy is condescending to gun owners, and is more insulting than a simple and honest, “no, we won’t stop sales to states that have made gun-owners second-class citizens.”