it just hit me that guns are one of the last product that is designed and marketed to a western market to be durable, modular,...
it just hit me that guns are one of the last product that is designed and marketed to a western market to be durable, modular, easy to maintain by oneself, and not depreciate
Yeah actually a lot of stuff in the firearms space – “tacticool” style, the industry group NRA’s financial straits, colored (esp pink!) guns, the drive to appeal to women and black shooters, the need for constant innovation – envelope-pushing short-barrel not-legally-a-rifle pistol carbines and not-legally-a-shotgun “Firearms”, novelties like the KSG or Judge, “buy before it’s banned!” hype – comes down to that.
Firearms are very durable and hold value well so for the industry to maintain they need a constant churn of new product (and newly manufactured needs); if you just wanted a decent hunting rifle you could just use a still-good hand-me-down from either grandfather of which you’re the only descendant to still hunt
in any other industry I would expect them to try and push for ongoing subscription fees instead of one off purchases, and wouldn’t that make perfect sense for ammo?
Gun manufacturer =/= ammunition manufacturer, as far as I know. Plus the largest consumers of ammunition are militaries, and western (read: NATO and other US allies) militaries all agreed to use standardised ammunition after seeing the logistical mess created by having multiple exclusive supply chains in the Second World War. This means the biggest market for ammo (and the biggest civilian market, because of course consumers will want the easy standardised option) is also the one where you’re competing with the most people and can’t innovate much.
right, I’d assume they’d come up with a flimsy justification to introduce a new ammo type “optimised for hunting” or home defence or whatever that just happens to be incompatible with the existing standards, then keep blathering on about how much better it is than legacy milcuck caliber until you feel like an idiot for not paying the extra premium, I mean that’s what everyone else does.
Well you kind of have this with .300 Blackout, which has advantages at a lot of things shooters might want to use the AR platform for today besides "win the Cold War”, and has been gaining on plain ‘ol .223.
But it’s an illustrative story – a lot of little-guy hobbyists and specialty businesses designed similar calibers for similar purposes but none attained hegemony. Then one small company gets a military contract, so they can really invest in developing it and establish it enough to become the dominant standard, with the result that… all the manufacturers can now compete at .300 Blackout upper receivers. And with the powder fully burned at shorter barrel length, maybe get a market bonus to their SBR/carbine pistol lines. Which in turn helps develop the silencer market.