I just finished reading “Gunfight” by Ryan Busse, a former vice-president of Kimber. The subtitle is “My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America.” Busse was happy to be in charge of sales for a company that manufactured high-end bolt action sporting rifles and 1911 pistols, but had no use for polymer pistols, handguns that held more than ten or so rounds, and AR15s which he, who should know better, insists on calling “assault rifles.” Sort of like a beer and wine salesman bemoaning the availability of hard liquor to the public.  He mentions that many gun rights activists call people like him “Fudds,” named after Elmer, the cartoon hunter who unsuccessfully stalked Bugs Bunny, and seems resentful that he fits that profile.

He’s not too thrilled with home defense shotguns, either. He writes disapprovingly of a man with “a tactical shotgun slung over his shoulder; this is a preferred weapon in close combat, designed to be quickly fired in tight spaces and to deliver a wide spray of deadly shot. Professional military officers and tactical law-enforcement units use these short-barreled weapons to clear entire buildings and to shoot multiple assailants in moving vehicles.”

SWAT teams “shoot multiple assailants in moving vehicles”?  I had no idea. Short-barrel smoothbores have been used as home defense tools since the time of the Pilgrims.  Methinks someone is unclear on the concept…

Busse appears to blame Smith & Wesson and the NRA (in no particular order) for things like the Parkland massacre, perpetrated with an S&W M&P AR15.  The many failures of those responsible to act upon the Parkland killer’s numerous early warning signals, and the anti-gun media’s long history of clearly implying to thwarted losers that they can become famous for mass-murdering the innocent, do not appear to be on his radar screen.  

He implies that the gun owners’ civil rights movement opposed Barack Obama because he was black.  Speaking just for myself, I thought America was overdue for an African-American President; I just thought it should be Condoleeza Rice, not Barack Obama.  Ryan, we opposed Obama because he disrespected the basic human right to effective self-defense.  

Mr. Busse gives the impression of someone who identifies as a progressive and feels he has to follow the pigeon-hole politics of the gun-banning far left.  I’m glad he has left the firearms industry that left him so conflicted, self-hating, and self-admittedly hypocritical.  I’m only sorry that I paid to buy his book and see what he had to say…which was nothing substantive.

None of what I’ve written should be applied negatively to Kimber, which supports gun owners’ civil rights vigorously, and no longer employs Ryan Busse.

46 COMMENTS

  1. He sounds like someone who is uncomfortable in his own skin. He was unable to get affirmation from his former peers and is instead seeking it from Leftists and “Progressives.” Mainstream cable tv is full of these people.

    As for Obama, he had the opportunity to be a great unifying force for this country. Instead, he choose to demonize people who didn’t agree with him and further divide the racial groups in this country. Unfortunately, he is still doing it through his human sock puppet.

    • Well said, he did have a unique opportunity to unite us like never before and sadly chose his ideological beliefs first. He was and still is an ideologue who like you said is pulling the strings of the “Weekend at Bernie’s” we have in the Whitehouse…

    • Mark,

      You are correct. Race relations were very good just before BHO became President. As we all know, Communists can’t get low income Americans to hate high income Americans, so they try to divide us along racial and gender lines. It’s the old “divide and conquer” strategy.

      I confess the only people I hate in America are criminals and those who want to force me into their workers’ paradise. My hatred is based on actions and ideologies, not race or anything else.

  2. Wow! I’m trying to understand a mind like Ryan Busse’s. It may be that he doesn’t like being identified with the negative associations that come with gun ownership. Let’s face it, it is easy to identify guns with war, suffering, crime, gangs, hideous wounds, terrorism and suicide. These are icky things that bother the minds of some, overly civilized people. I confess I used to get pretty uncomfortable when reading about the horrors of war. After a while, I got used to it.

    I am re-reading Jeff Cooper’s, “To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth” for the third time. His chapter entitled, “The Root of the Evil” pages 16–19, discusses the irrational fear of weapons. He concludes that we cannot use reason, facts or common sense when talking to hoplophobes. They are “obsessive neurotic(s).” We cannot change them.

    It seems to me that people can be brilliant in one subject and idiots in another subject. One part of their brain works fine, but another part is defective. I do not understand how Bruce Jenner can want to be a woman, yet his political thoughts are excellent. Obviously, Hitler had a demented mind, yet he was co-inventor of the Volkswagen Beetle, which, until recently, was the most popular car ever built.

    Looks like Ryan Busse has joined the company of Judas, Benedict Arnold, William Franklin and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I’m glad there are many more people joining the NRA than leaving it. I’m also glad Ryan Busse wrote his book. It reminds me of looking at a two-headed cow at the State Fair. A real oddity. Truth is stranger than fiction.

    • @ Roger Willco – “His chapter entitled, ‘The Root of the Evil’ pages 16–19, discusses the irrational fear of weapons. He concludes that we cannot use reason, facts or common sense when talking to hoplophobes.”

      While I don’t want to blaspheme, I must say that this is one area where Jeff Cooper is wrong. His mistake arises from oversimplifying the mind of the anti-gunners. Given his worldview and his life experience, Jeff Cooper could only view anti-gunners as being irrational. He, therefore, evolved this view that they had a phobia toward firearms. He defined the term “hoplophobia” to describe an “unreasoning and irrational fear of firearms”. He placed it in the same category as other types of phobias such as fear of heights or fear of enclosed spaces.

      This is not what is really going on in the mind of anti-gunners. The difference between the right-wing and left-wing worldviews boils down to differences in basic views regarding the nature of man. In humans, there seems to be a “Good or Evil Setting”, at the subconscious level, inside the human mind. Like other personality traits such as the difference between being an extrovert or an introvert.

      This setting varies from viewing humans as “basically good” to the view that humans are “basically evil”. The truth, of course, is the right-wing view that humans naturally trend toward being basically evil. The human species evolved in a primitive, savage, tribal world, and we still carry this in our nature. Humans, if left to develop naturally, will become savages. It takes training, education, and discipline to turn the raw material of a child into a responsible adult.

      Leftists, however, are cursed with a strong subconscious setting that tells them that all humans are naturally good. This is a setting at variance with how the real-world works. This explains why left-wing ideologies, when implemented in the real world, always prove disastrous and counter-productive.

      Their flawed mental setting leads them to evolve their left-wing ideologies. You see, leftists cannot explain the “Evil” in the world by blaming it upon mankind himself (which is the truth). That obvious answer is at variance with their subconscious mental setting. So, they must engage in “Blame-Shifting” the source of the world’s evils.

      All left-wing ideologies are based upon this concept of “Blame-Shifting”. Various types of shifts have been proposed by the leftists. Over the years, they have tried placing the blame upon poverty, child-abuse, drug / alcohol abuse, etc. They still blame capitalism which gives rise to their socialism and communism ideologies. Our current left-wing ideological plague is based upon a combined grouping of racism/sexism/homophobia and climate-change blame-shifts.

      As you can see, it is all “Blame Shifting”. Everything is at fault except for mankind himself. A leftist can NEVER go there and place the blame on humanity. That would “rock his world” completely. The left-wing, subconscious mental setting will not let him/her/or it make that leap!

      Given their “Blame-Shifting” worldview, leftists (of course) place the blame for violence upon the easy availability of firearms and other weapons. If we could only eliminate the weapons, they sigh, the world would become a paradise of peace and love!

      They ignore the fact that, before firearms, the world was far more savage. See this link:

      https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/a_mexican_cave_disgorged_a_massive_precolumbian_crime_scenea_mexican_cave_disgorged_a_massive_precolumbian_crime_scene.html

      So, Cooper is basically wrong on this point. Leftists do not hate firearms because they are hoplophobes. They are not driven by “irrational fears or phobias”. Their approach is quite rational GIVEN their mistaken subconscious belief in the goodness of mankind. Their problem is MENTAL, but it is related to a subconscious setting inside their mind. It is not related to a phobia.

      Jeff Cooper was correct in his conclusion even if his path to arrive there was wrong. One cannot use reason, logic or commonsense to educate a leftist into not being a leftist. The higher, reasoning portion of the mind cannot control or adjust what goes on at the subconscious level. Perhaps a traumatic shock could “flip the setting” in a left-wing mind but it is beyond the power of reason or logic to do so.

    • Roger, you’re wrong about who invented the Volkswagen Beetle. Al Gore invented that popular car and the later VW van, the Autobahn, the jet engine, advised Werner von Braun on rockets, and headed the secret Manhatten Project while warming up to create the Internet and gave it for free to humanity. Give credit where it’s really due.

  3. About racism. If America is so racist, and white people just can’t help being racist, then it stands to reason that someone should move to a non-racist country with no white people in it.

    If America is racist, how come President Hussein was elected TWICE? How come he was never assassinated? Hey, there are lots of white supremacists running around America, causing all sorts of problems with crime, yet they allowed a black President to rule over them for eight years? They didn’t even try to kill him? Then I guess all these white supremacists are not so bad after all. Certainly, they are ineffective if they can’t keep a black man out of the White House.

    Stefan Molyneux gives us the answer. He said, when people complain about America, or American men, or whatever, it is because they are seeking resources. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Al Sharpton is proof that complaining about America is profitable.

    • My theory on how Hussein was allowed to fulfill both terms with no attempts is that: anyone with enough sense to pull it off also had enough sense to understand why Joe Biden was his VP. And we’re seeing the living embodiment of what that would have wraught on us many years earlier, and from a weaker starting point.

  4. I think he sounds like a man who wants to make money and is willing to compromise whatever ethics he may have to ride the gravy train without regard to its destination.

  5. Busse was never on “our” side. His perspective on firearms, and the Second Amendment show this. He’s FOS.

  6. Hispanic voters give Biden a 26% approval rating (Quinnipiac) – lower than American voters in general. The accusations of systemic racism by Mr. Busse and others are backfiring.

  7. Busse sounds like a man who used to be the secretary of a club i once belonged to who said ”if you want to play with those then join the army” or the well known gun journalist here who was happy to fight for gun owners back in 1996 but now doesn’t like what the owners still have available in 2022.

    Sort of like the firearms version of a nimby ie not in my back yard.

  8. “When One Of Our Side Goes To The Other Side” I would have to question that statement. Fudd comes to mind except that even Fudds are gun supporters as long as it’s their preferred hunting equipment. I would have to say he NEVER WAS on our side and was just a businessman in a management position at a 2A company.

  9. Mr. Busse attempts to add enlightenment for gun control through misleading and exaggerated “facts”. It has always been difficult for me to understand the hypocrisy and inconsistency of such a mindset.
    Kudos to you Mas, for reviewing the book and educating the public on it.

  10. Sounds like a man who, after becoming irrelevant, craves attention. The Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame syndrome. The same kind of man writes about how horribly treated he was a child, even though he wasn’t, to get a book deal.

  11. Total agreement about Condoleeza Rice. I think she would have made a great President.

    Not because she is a woman. Not because she is black.

  12. Howdy. Don’t ignore the obvious- he NEVER WAS “one of ours”. He was simply an executive who got hired by a gun company to do executive stuff, and then left after a while, and figured out there was money to be had for spewing what he had always thought anyway but keep under wraps for awhile while he was an executive for a gun company. He never was “one of ours”; he was simply self serving, and remains so. When big business organizations have problems, the reason they go down the road to failure is because executives of his ilk make it priority one to Protect Executive Salaries ahead of doing what is best for the business. We have seen, IMHO, Colt go that way a couple of times ( looking better now, under ownership of CZ ). The point made about Al Sharpton is correct. Some anti gun rights group will look to take this jackass on to it’s payroll.

  13. Well he was clearly in it just for the money when he was with Kimber. Good riddance…

    Mas, concerning your words, “Speaking just for myself, I thought America was overdue for an African-American President; I just thought it should be Condoleeza [sic] Rice, not Barack Obama.”:
    You weren’t just speaking for yourself, you were speaking for me and I’m sure enough other middle aged white males that if the number was known it might make heads explode among the mainstream media types. Loosing Condoleezza Rice back to the private sector was a loss for our country. There are so many other politicians whom I wish I could “wish into the private sector” instead (as in the “wish into the cornfield” from a classic Twilight Zone episode).

  14. The benedict Arnolds of this world can play a part for a long time, but in the end, they will show their real colors. People will cow tau to the most advantageous offers on the field, so Busse sounds no different. Sad to say when were in the battle of our lives.
    One similar man comes to mind thinking of old Mike Pence. In one of the greatest struggles of our time we needed to defend the Constitutionality of our election process and fight outright corruption 2020. I see his failure as intentional for whatever the motivations were at the time. Just like William Wallace cried out, “We can take these filthy bastards, don’t abandon the fight.” We’re in the last throws of America God help us all. My greatest fear for the U.S. is the intentional acceptance of the extreme left’s agenda. Depopulate this nation, eliminate the resistance, and corral the rest of the passive followers. The great reset.

    • Jim,

      I agree. All Pence had to do was to ask for a repeat of what was done after the year 2000 election. Pence should have said he was unsure whether the 2016 election was fair or not. Take a few weeks to examine it, like we did in 2000, then make a pronouncement. My guess is that both Pence and the judges in the courts were afraid. Did someone threaten them? I can’t prove anything, all I know is I trust Rudolph Giuliani, and he believes the amount of fraud committed during the 2016 election was decisive.

    • Ed,

      Thanks. I proofread, but still make mistakes. Yes, all elections have fraud, but, in my view, the 2020 election had enough fraud to turn the victory from Trump to Biden. I mistakenly wrote “2016 election” in both the third sentence and the last sentence. That should be “2020 election.”

  15. As got harped at by his wife for “providing arms that killed children.” Yeah, he married one of those.

    Source is Tom Gresham/Guntalk Radio.

  16. I voted for Alan Keyes twice before Obama ran. Somehow the fact of his ethnic background did not enter into my consideration.

    • echodeltacharlie (a.k.a. Every Day Carry),

      Yes, Alan Keyes, Condoleezza Rice, Walter E. Williams, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Colion Noir, David Clarke, Joe Clark, Tyrus, Roy Innis, Niger Innis, Burgess Owens and Candace Owens all would, or would have, made fine Presidents.

      Diamond & Silk could be co-White House Press Secretaries. Speaking of White House Press Secretaries, I would love to watch Ben Shapiro skewer the Press. Donald Trump did a fine job of being his own Press Secretary, but he needs to learn to edit himself. Nevertheless, “fake news” was accurate and brilliant.

  17. Mr. Ayoob – Thank you for all the useful information you have provided over the years. I have tried my best to read everything you have written. I believe we need your help with a new development. The latest, greatest monometal projectiles with fluted tips (Flying Phillips Screwdrivers) have been tested by ballistic Jello Junkies but we need a Morgue Monster to find and document actual shootings with the fancy things. You are, as always, uniquely qualified to search out that data for us so I hope you can find the time to reach out to your network of investigators in the world of law enforcement and find out if these things actually work as advertised. Just a suggestion but I do not know of anyone else who has access to this type of data.

    • I’ve shot hogs with fluted pistol bullets, and gotten about the same results as with good hollow points. Some gun experts I respect, such as Martin Topper and Bill Wilson, have gotten better results. I’ve not yet found a documented case of a human being shot with one.

  18. This man is no different than all the other left wing zealots that are infiltrating companies, schools, political organizations, etc. They enter these by professing to be supporters then start to implement their agendas e.g., Disney and others. These are dangerous people and a threat to our republic. Be aware and expose them whenever and wherever they are found.

  19. Man!! I thought I was the only one who wanted Condoleeza Rice as President.., ok one of many, she is great and smart and just what Americans need as the commander in chief!!

  20. Because it was written by someone “within the industry” with “intimate knowledge” it will be accorded just authority by those in the left wing media just the interview with the former VP engineer with Colt concerning the differences between the AR 15 and the M4, or the retired Army General teaching a CNN reporter how to shoot an AR 15. Both videos are on YouTube.

    I like to compare the Army General’s instructions to the CNN reporter to the series of “Shooter’s Corner” videos also on YouTube where the Army’s instructors at Ft. Benning show how to properly the shoot the M4 and M9. It clear that the General was either trying to send a political message concerning the AR 15 or he was totally incompetent when it came to shooting and teaching shooting. He should have left it to his sergeants to teach the CNN reporter.

    The is an old saying in aviation: “painting four strips on a jackass doesn’t make it a zebra!” Sounds like what we have here.

  21. It appears comrade Busse is a victim of the dreaded “White Guilt” which has recently spread like wildfire among the more mentally challenged of us.

    As for the first black president, my choice would have been Booker T. Washington, elected right after Theodore Roosevelt who invited him to the White House. If all six grade students here in the U.S.A. read Mr. Washington’s book Up From Slavery, we would not have most of the racial problems that exist now. Not only would Mr. Washington have made a great American president, he would have displaced the arrogant and evil Woodrow Wilson and saved our country from a lot of later grief. As far as the future, if Aunt Kamala and Loonie Louie Farrakan aren’t running for the White House, I’m rooting for The Reverend Albert Sharpton who will lead our nation back to even more greatness again and unite all races of the world.

  22. Maybe he made a good amount of wealth in the industry he now demonizes? Maybe he rubs elbows with wealth at golf outings and charity events? Maybe he see’s wealth in supporting the likes of Bloomberg and BHO? Maybe the next book he writes it will be authored by “Rachel Busse?” You know kinda like our HHS director, Rachel Levin? *spit*

  23. You need to open your eyes further. Busse’s personal views go much farther than just those on firearms. Check out his involvement in Back Country Hunters & Anglers, their views, and who else he supported in past elections.

  24. Quote of the Day:

    “From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”

    The above words of Abraham Lincoln are proving prophetic. It looks like the American Republic has chosen the “Suicide” option with the Democrat Party and their low-information supporters stepping into the role of Dr. Kevorkian to provide the assist!

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