Washington Post – by Aaron C. Davis
Beretta, the nearly 500-year-old family-owned company that made one of James Bond’s firearms, has already invested more than $1 million in the machine and has planned to expand its plant further in Prince George’s County to ramp up production.
Now Beretta is weighing whether the rifle line, and perhaps the company itself, should stay in a place increasingly hostile toward its products. Its iconic 9mm pistol — carried by every U.S. soldier and scores of police departments — would also be banned with its high capacity, 13-bullet magazine.
“Why expand in a place where the people who built the gun couldn’t buy it?” said Jeffrey Reh, general counsel for Beretta.
Concern that the company will leave, and take its 300 jobs with it, is palpable among state lawmakers who worry it could be collateral damage from Gov. Martin O’Malley’s proposed gun-control bill.
Among other restrictions, O’Malley’s bill would ban assault rifles, magazines with more than 10 bullets and any new guns with two or more “military-like” features. Gun experts said it’s a near-certainty that Beretta’s semiautomatic version of the ARX-160, now only a prototype, would be banned under O’Malley’s bill.
“I’m concerned. I think they’re going to move,” said Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert). “They sell guns across the world and in every state in the union — to places a lot more friendly to the company than this state.”
In Beretta’s low-slung factory along the Potomac River in Accokeek, where walls are lined with trophy heads of caribou, wild boars and black bears shot by employees, the legislation proposed by O’Malley (D) feels like an affront.
In testimony this month in Annapolis, Reh, who oversees the plant, warned lawmakers to consider carefully the company’s future. Reh pointed to the last time Maryland ratcheted up gun restrictions in the 1990s: Beretta responded by moving its warehouse operation to Virginia.
“I think they thought we were bluffing” in the 1990s, Reh said. “But Berettas don’t bluff.”
Growth of a company
The small U.S. division that Beretta started 35 years ago in Prince George’s has added substantial swagger to a company that already billed itself as the “World’s Oldest Industrial Dynasty.”
From behind the modest brick facade of an abandoned gun plant it purchased in 1977 on Indian Head Highway, Beretta won a landmark contract to become the standard sidearm of all U.S. military personnel in 1985. To the chagrin of American competitors, it soon replaced the venerable Colt 45.
More than a half-million of the company’s guns have been shipped to the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines, each stamped as made in Accokeek.
To fulfill the contract, Beretta expanded the plant by the length of a football field, installed an underground shooting range and hired 500 people. By 1990, during the peak of the first Gulf War, the company was the second-largest employer in Southern Maryland and had a supply chain of contractors that employed hundreds more.
The company’s new rifle, which it is reluctant to call an “assault” weapon, could add to that profile. It would be the first civilian version of a machine gun that is now available only to militaries, and that is configured with a clip-on grenade launcher for many special operations units.
Beretta plans to sell the semiautomatic, .223 caliber version as the ARX-100. It is expected to sell for about $2,000.
Uncertain future
The assault-weapons ban isn’t the only part of the governor’s bill Beretta dislikes.
In Maryland, gun manufacturers are required to register as firearms dealers, which some say could expose the company to lawsuits for selling and shipping weapons as dealers do. The Senate Judiciary Committee, which passed the governor’s bill 7 to 4 late Thursday, spelled out an exemption for Beretta and a handful of other smaller manufacturers in the state.
But the company said it is still not clear how it would handle warranty and repair issues for its many lines of guns, which are also serviced in Accokeek. The bill does not specify if the company could charge to fix guns that would be deemed illegal for sale, or if it could legally ship them back to their owners. Lawmakers said intermediary gun dealers would likely have to facilitate the transactions.
O’Malley aides say the bill could have outright banned manufacturing of assault weapons in the state but did not in part because of Beretta, which has agreed to meet with the administration on Monday to discuss the bill.
“We think getting assault weapons off the streets and keeping this company can both be accomplished,” said Raquel Guillory, O’Malley’s spokeswoman.
But some lawmakers said Beretta will have to be a bigger part of the discussion before the bill passes.
Del. Joseph F. Vallario Jr. (D-Prince George’s), whose district encompasses the Accokeek plant, said he would do everything he could for the company.
“We want to keep those jobs,” said Vallario, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which has a key role in approving the legislation.
As he walked along the production floor recently, Reh said Beretta officials say they do not want to leave their U.S. headquarters in Maryland.
Relocating high-tech machining equipment and vats of chrome used to plate Beretta barrels would be costly and out of character for a company that is still based in the Italian town where it began in 1526.
The company’s Italian patriarch, Ugo Gussalli Beretta, visited the plant shortly after O’Malley introduced his gun-control bill, and the two discussed the issue. But Reh declined to say if the two reached any decisions about what would happen if the governor’s bill passes.
“All I can tell you is, Mr. Beretta said, ‘There always seems to be a problem with Maryland.’ ”
Beretta needs to join the mounting number of companies that are boycotting states and their affiliates that are actively in the process of attempting to dismantle the Constitution. Failure to do so is consent for what the Constitution haters are doing and should therefore be boycotted themselves. Let their only customer be the military and enforcers in the new police state.
I love how these politicians prattle on about boosting the economy and jobs then demonize entire industries and try to outright ban them. What about the people who make a living working in the firearms industry or those that work for soda distributors in Nanny York City.
The proposed legislation is absolutely an affront & insult to Beretta and before it is passed they should tell the legislatures that the passage will force them to relocate somewhere their business is appreciated.
In addition I would like to see them stop doing business in States that inhibit & restrict their legal/lawful products.
Hey Beretta, come on down to Texas. We’d love to have you as neighbors. The cost of living and doing business is a hellova lot cheaper. We have great BBQ also.
Beretta and any other firearm manufacture will be welcome with open arms in Michigan.
The only Beretta I’ve ever owned was a .32 auto. Won it in a poker game.
That was back in the sixties.