Gun Manufacturer Bails on Virginia, Heads to Pro-Gun Georgia

If the firearm industry is as massive as anti-gunners claim, then politicians should be wary about passing gun control. After all, even a little bit of it might be enough to drive the industry from your state entirely, taking jobs and other economic benefits with it.

In fact, we’ve seen something of an exodus from many anti-gun states as companies decided to not just leave places hostile toward their businesses, but that are also trying to make it easier for them to be sued for the actions of third parties.

Now, with Virginia’s anti-gun cabal calling the shots in the Old Dominion State, at least one company has decided to move from there to just a few miles down the road from me in Southwest Georgia.

On Wednesday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced a firearms manufacturer will leave the state of Virginia over new “anti-gun legislation” and relocate to Georgia, bringing a $22 million investment and employing hundreds of residents.

“Georgia attracts job creators from all over the country and world because we work with them, not against them,” Kemp said. “Our state’s pro-business approach, skilled workforce, and enduring support for constitutional freedoms make us an ideal home for manufacturers like Rideout Arsenal, and we look forward to their success here in the No. 1 state for business.”

Rideout Arsenal, the firearms designer and manufacturer launching the new facility, has announced it will be opening its doors in the South Georgia town of Thomasville.

“Today we welcome Rideout Arsenal to Thomasville. This includes new highly skilled jobs, new partnerships, new careers, and new momentum for our community,” Thomasville Mayor Scott Chastain said. “Most importantly, we welcome the Rideout family to our community.”

The new facility will be located within the Plantation Oak Industrial Park, with additional buildings planned throughout the next several years.

Thomasville is a beautiful community filled with Victorian homes and a long history of really doing Christmas in style, and now they’re home to a small firearm manufacturer that makes a pretty interesting handgun.

The Rideout Arsenal Dragon is a semi-auto handgun with a ridiculously low bore axis. This apparently reduces muzzle rise and lets you get off follow-up shots much quicker. It’s not an inexpensive handgun, but it’s an interesting one, and it’ll be made close to home, which is nice for yours truly.

And, honestly, I absolutely understand why they’d make the move. The Dragon, which isn’t on the market just yet, it seems, features a standard magazine capacity well above what Virginia now tolerates, with the company’s site listing it as 20+1 or 17+1 depending on the configuration. Why build a gun in a state where your own employees couldn’t carry it as it was intended to be carried?

Here in the Peach State, we hold no such restrictions on magazine capacity.

There will be more such relocations, and for a whole lot of reasons. Anti-gun states are going to lose jobs, and the truth is that if they start making light of there only being a few jobs lost, they might have to explain how the gun industry can be so massive as to control the United States government if they aren’t hurting the states they’re moving manufacturing operations out of.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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