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Because of restrictions on the sale of automatic weapons, civilians could buy the AR-15 only in a semiautomatic version. But in the 1980s, Colt drew unwanted attention when it was discovered that the gun, which had begun showing up in the arsenals of drug dealers, mobsters and antigovernment militias, could be easily converted to an automatic.
Colt redesigned the weapon to make converting it much more difficult, but when Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the AR-15 was banned alongside the AK-47, the TEC-9 and 16 other semiautomatic weapons. The act also prohibited semiautomatics that could accept detachable magazines from having more than one of five generic features that were believed to increase the likelihood that the gun would be used in a crime. The National Rifle Association lobbied hard against the bill, but many hunters agreed with the premise that assault weapons were of little use in their sport.
“These killing machines are the weapon of choice of drug traffickers, violent youth gangs and the seriously deranged bent on revenge through mass murder,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, then a House member from New York who was one of the bill’s champions, said in April 1994. “They have no place in our society.”
But if the spirit of the law was a blow to black rifles, the letter of it allowed them to live on and thrive. Colt focused on supplying weapons to the military and law enforcement. But competitors were already copying the rifle, since the original patents granted to ArmaLite had expired. All they had to do was rejigger their designs to reduce the number of offending features.
Demand for black rifles, meanwhile, began to grow. A new generation of hunters, many of whom had fired M-16s in the military, adopted them for shooting predators on rural property and stalking small game. The .223-caliber ammunition they used was inexpensive and easily found. The guns began to get a reputation for being durable despite their light weight; they also loaded automatically (unlike bolt-action hunting rifles) and their recoil was gentle enough for even novice shooters and children to withstand. Once the AR-15 was deemed accurate enough for use in high-powered rifle competitions, it soon became standard issue for target shooters.
And with the basic design of black rifles open to industrywide adaptations, gun makers began adding their own innovations and accessories to refine and improve the AR-15’s performance. By 2004, when the assault weapons ban expired, black rifles had emerged as a major category in firearms. But while Colt’s sales had shrunk in the intervening years, output exploded for black-rifle specialists like Bushmaster, Rock River Arms and DPMS.
“The little guys perfected the platform,” says Michael Bane, a gun blogger and writer who is the host of “Shooting Gallery,” a program on the Outdoor Channel on cable television. “They had the 10 years of the ban to get their chops down.”
But for most of those 10 years, these small manufacturers managed to fly under the radar of many gun owners, including Mr. Zumbo, a self-described traditionalist who says he had seen only one black rifle during a lifetime of hunting. “I had absolutely zero idea of the number of people who are into these types of firearms,” he says.
Not so for Mr. Nugent, who stocked up on black rifles before the ban took effect and estimates that he now owns about two dozen. If the boom in black rifles began in spite of the federal assault weapons ban, it has accelerated only in the two and a half years since the ban expired. Manufacturers have been freed to revive once-prohibited features like collapsible stocks, flash suppressors and large-capacity magazines.
Analysts say that images from the Iraq war showing American soldiers armed with black rifles have also helped sales, as have concerns about domestic safety after Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina. “People on the street want to use what the people in the military and law enforcement are using,” says Amit Dayal, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw in New York.
Based only on the volume of accessories sold — such as high-powered scopes and flashlights — Mr. Bane estimates that as many as 750,000 black rifles, including about 400,000 AR-15s, change hands each year. Brownells, a company in Montezuma, Iowa, a big seller of firearms parts and accessories, says AR-15 gear has become its best-selling product category.
Because all but a few gun manufacturers are closely held private companies, overall sales figures for the black rifle industry are hard to come by. But companies are required to report their overall rifle production to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and based on that, many of the small manufacturers that have specialized in the guns are “on the verge of being big,” Mr. Bane says. One, Stag Arms of New Britain, Conn., opened in 2004 and is already producing 2,500 to 3,000 black rifles a month, according to the president and owner, Mark Malkowski. That would be 30,000 to 36,000 a year, roughly the same number that Colt was producing in the late 1990s.
Buoyant demand has enticed a number of established gunsmiths into the market, too. Smith & Wesson, known for its revolvers, has made black rifles a strategic priority in its turnaround. It introduced its first model in early 2006. It was so popular that the company had to supplement manufacturing of the gun, which had been outsourced, just to meet consumer demand.
“It’s our hope that we would be the share leader in the category,” says Leland A. Nichols, Smith & Wesson’s chief operating officer. He said that in the company’s own surveys of consumers, its brand outpolled all other black rifle makers before it even had a product on the market.
A similar story is unfolding at the Remington Arms Company, long one of the strongest brands in hunting rifles. The company started its first line of black rifles earlier this year. In April, Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm that recently made a deal to buy Chrysler, agreed to acquire Remington for $370 million, adding it to the gun maker Bushmaster in the fund’s portfolio and raising the possibility of collaboration between the two companies.
“A month ago black guns were not a business opportunity,” says Al Russo, a spokesman for Remington, citing the growth potential that the Cerberus deal offers. “Now they are.”