Here are my assertions regarding the origin of the S&W internal revolver lock.
In the late 1990's the handgun market was going through a total disruption. S&W had dominated this market in the US for decades and decades. It was also practically the only market S&W was in. They didn't have a lot of other products or merchandise. Handgun customers were overwhelmingly purchasing automatics instead of revolvers. Also, they were buying polymer-framed guns, which S&W did not offer, but competitors like Glock did. With respect to S&W's traditional law-enforcement and government customers, this was overwhelmingly the case.
S&W was about to be ruined by competitors that were offering something S&W had not even foreseen as appealing: inexpensive polymer automatics for duty use. These guns were, after all, completely anti-thematic to nearly 150 years of S&W tradition that regarded handguns as products carefully crafted by skilled machinists to be used by unique individuals as weapons in the defense of their life and in the pursuit of justice. Glock had no legacy of machining, no tradition of craftsmanship, no experience building weapons, and the people who would produce them would have no regard for the product any different than if they were making sewing machines or blenders. To get S&W to realize the monumental shift that was occurring in their business would take a generational turnover. It doesn't even seem plausible to believe that people who worked at S&W wanted to make this change, but the company's continuing existence depended on it. It's owners, a British company called Tomkins PLC, however, just wanted to be rid of it as it did not fit the agenda for their own restructuring in the automotive and industrial markets (they make Gates belts and hoses and Ideal brand clamps among other things).
If things weren't bad enough, in 1998, there came the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. Big Tobacco was being forced to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in this settlement. Investors knew guns could be next. S&W already had over 20 lawsuits pending against it. In such an environment, how could anyone expect this business to be capitalized?
Robert L. Scott, 10 years a S&W Vice President, had already seen the writing on the wall, disillusioned with Tomkins leadership, he left S&W to start Saf-T-Hammer corporation in Arizona. Saf-T-Hammer made trigger locks, secure storage products, and a device that disconnected the firing pin, which promised to be more elegant than a Master Lock in the trigger guard, but was widely reported as dysfunctional. In 1999, the "Gun Tests" publication tested similar products from about eight different companies and reported, "A member of our staff visited the Saf-T-Hammer booth at the 1999 Shot Show and could not get the hammer back in place..." Some people have compared it to Cylinder & Slide's more functional device:
http://www.cylinder-slide.com/cond5.shtml It was a company that employed a total of 5 people. They were in a market that was a secure distance from the legal risks firearms manufacturers were enduring, and they didn't make anything more nefarious than the kind of padlocks or trigger locks that litter gun stores and new gun boxes today.
Can we agree that gun locks like the ones included in almost every sale of a firearm aren't evil? Responsible firearm owners need to securely store every firearm not on their person. For some people, the drawer of their nightstand or the glovebox of their car is secure. People with children need a better way to securely store their firearms when they're away. We might not appreciate a cable-lock or clamshell trigger-lock, but are those over-priced gypsum-lined steel cabinets sold as "gun safes" better? They sure lighten your wallet and load your floor more, but they're a scam. We know they don't meaningfully prevent theft or fire damage better than a token padlock. Besides, do people that just own a cheap plastic S&W SD9 really need a Fort Knox that costs more than the gun, maybe even a 100-times more than the gun to store it? Is gun ownership only for people in the US who can afford a luxury storage solution and professional movers every time they relocate? Or is the humble gun latch a symbol of freedom that says we can store our guns unsecured, or secured according to our conscience and not only enclosed in accordance with requirements of California Penal Code Section 120126.1(c)?
Saf-T-Hammer Chairman Mitchell A. Saltz, it seems, had some money to spend on something bigger than a lock company. Specifically, he had Colton Melby's money along with another associate from Arizona, James Joseph Minder. He was also willing to bet on the risk of at least 20 lawsuits, mostly from municipalities alleging that a handgun maker's manufacture and distribution of weapons has been negligent or has caused a public nuisance by contributing to crimes and accidental deaths. He correctly foresaw those suits being tossed. He also already employed Bob Scott who knew the operations inside and out and wouldn't take up to a year to learn them. So he bought S&W from the British "Tomkins PLC" for a mere $15 million. Tomkins had paid $112 million, and Saltz and his investors would eventually spin it into AOBC with a present market capitalization of over $500 million.
Melby, the money-man, was best known for being the boyfriend of Paula Abdul. Minder, it turns out, was a former hold-up man known for carrying a sawed-off 16 gauge shotgun, and who served time in prison for a string of armed robberies, a bank heist, an attempted prison escape, and again for robbing a store while he was attending university. He would later be chairman of S&W.
The truth is, it was these guys, Saltz, Scott, Melby, and Minder that put that lock on there. The fact is, saying Paula Abdul put it there is closer to the truth than saying Hillary Clinton did it.
Notice I haven't mentioned anyone in the Clinton administration until now. That's because they didn't have anything to do with Saf-T-Hammer. No one in the Clinton administration had any meaningful influence over Saf-T-Hammer, and before it bought S&W from Tomkins, it was not regulated in any meaningful way nor did it have any money or legal problems. They made gun locks. They employed 5 people.
Bush was President, and they had $15 million burning a hole in their pocket and probably then some because they were willing to take on over $50 million of S&W's debt.
Going back to 2000, a year before Saf-T-Hammer acquired S&W, Tomkins made a deal with the Clinton administration to settle pending and threatened Clinton-DOJ, as well as several state and local lawsuits. According to the Wall Street Journal article on the subject, "The deal required S&W to put
external locks on its guns and to sell only to dealers that agreed to certain conditions." (emphasis added) Consider that Tomkins did not have an internal lock. They could not agree to put something on the gun that they did not have. They certainly could not have agreed to put Saf-T-Hammer's lock on the guns. They might have agreed to do something undetermined in the future, and it turns out that's what most of this agreement was about.
The agreement was announced by the Clinton administration in this press release:
http://web.archive.org/web/20170109174933/https://clinton3.nara.gov/WH/New/html/20000317_2.html Note this is not the actual text of the agreement, but how the Clinton Administration presented it to the press.
The agreement is like a "wish-list" with internal locking devices on
pistols within 24 months, smart guns within 36 months, 10-round magazine limits on all firearms, sales only to dealers that require safety training, and no sales of semi-automatic assault weapons and a prohibition of sales of more than one handgun to a customer every 14 days. Which of these things has S&W not completely and blatantly ignored? I mean, they practically got into the AR-15 business just to flaunt this agreement.
History tells us Tomkins made this agreement to end the lawsuits and enter into a "preferred buying program" from the municipalities that had been suing them, and they were awarded a $1.7 million grant to develop "smart guns," all of which they hoped would offset the losses from an anticipated consumer boycott. The boycott was immediate, the preferred buyer program was alleged to be illegal, smart guns weren't feasible, and the agreement proved to be unenforceable.
When Saf-T-Hammer bought S&W, "Mr. Saltz said that the new owners would re-examine the deal with the government. His lawyers have told him 'that there are certain things in those agreements that can be interpreted in more than one way,' he said, declining to elaborate further."
Just as sure as S&W sells AR-15's, pistols without an internal lock, more than one handgun at a time, magazines with a capacity greater than ten, and no "smart guns," the lock on the revolver has nothing to do with the Tomkins agreement with the Clinton administration.
In fact, the Huff Post reported that S&W Holding (Saf-T-Hammer) broke the deal its predecessor had made completely, “A key element of its strategy was openly repudiating the terms of the Clinton gun safety deal and introducing a new line of high-capacity pistols and its first-ever, assault-style rifle, which became top-sellers for the company. The turnaround was facilitated by the Bush administration, which failed to enforce the terms of the gun-safety deal and aided Smith & Wesson with major new federal contracts.”
The fact is, the Bush administration was already in place in May of 2001 when Saf-T-Hammer acquired S&W. The Clinton-era deal was already dead. Jon Cowan, former president of Americans for Gun Safety said, “The Bush administration was deeply in the pocket of the NRA and decided not to enforce this agreement.”
The Wall Street Journal reported as early as 2001 that S&W Holding (Saf-T-Hammer) executives and a HUD official with the Bush administration (HUD was responsible for enforcing the agreement) both claimed the Clinton deal was considered non-binding. “HUD is not enforcing it,” the official told the Journal. “In fact, HUD is not doing anything with it.”
Do you think Saf-T-Hammer's investors would have bought S&W without knowing the new (Bush) administration would toss the agreement? They knew before they bought it. They had 7 months to work it out with the new administration.
So where did the lock come from? After the agreement, the boycott, the dissolution of the agreement, and the sale of S&W to Saf-T-Hammer, the Wall Street Journal reported, "Mr. Scott, who will relocate to Springfield to direct Smith & Wesson, said some Saf-T-Hammer products may be incorporated into the guns 'where they work and where they make sense.'"
Bob Scott was still in Arizona. His boss had just bought S&W for some investors and as the president of Saf-T-Hammer, he was personally under no constraint by this agreement with the Clinton administration which had by then all appearances of having fallen apart, and which Scott almost certainly knew was "non-binding" at that point. But he believed a Saf-T-Hammer product could be incorporated into a Smith and Wesson gun where it worked and where it made sense.
The fact is, the revolver lock does work. In fact, it's remarkable how incredibly well it works compared to the reports from 1999 on previous Saf-T-Hammer products which must have been embarrassingly bad. There are those few legends of failure out there, but I know these reports are not the cause of the vehement hatred of these locks. Ruger transfer bars have a far higher failure rate than S&W internal locks, and they don't earn nearly as much scorn. It is certainly because the S&W revolver locks are incorrectly associated with the Tomkins-Clinton agreement with which Saf-T-Hammer had nothing to do and was never under any obligation to uphold.
As we know, Saf-T-Hammer renamed itself to Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation and announced its intention to acquire many other synergistic brands and after numerous substantial acquisitions became American Outdoor Brands Corporation. The original investors like Colton Melby eventually stepped down amid controversy with the SEC about late earnings disclosures. He's currently chairman and chief executive of ORHUB, a SaaS-based healthcare data analytics company -- they host apps for operating rooms. He's not with Paula anymore either. Minder, who had become chairman of S&W, stepped down after it was disclosed that he had been convicted of a string of armed robberies. He remained as a director for some time thereafter. Bob Scott is still Vice Chairman of the Board for AOBC since 1999. Nobody has served on that board longer than him, and he was at S&W for 10 years before that. More than 30 years at the top of S&W. When the company was just five people he said he'd put that lock on there. It's just as good as he put that lock on there personally.
I tell you what. You go tell Bob Scott that's a "Hillary Hole" and that Clinton put that on there.
