The PTR-91 South Carolina Commemorative Edition
Courtesy of PTR Industries
When PTR Industries announced last year it would flee Connecticut for the firearms-friendly state of South Carolina, it made a public statement of defiance and political will.
The maker of military style, semi-automatic rifles was founded and grounded in Bristol but on April 4, 2013, when the governor of its home state outlawed its only product in the fallout of the Sandy Hook tragedy, the time to move had come.
Underneath the public blustering lay a series of private decisions by employees, some wrenching and lonely. We don’t move easily in the Land of Steady Habits. By Dec. 10, the start of the month-long company trek to Aynor, S.C., 21 of 47 PTR managers and workers had committed to exit Connecticut.
“Some of them may have decided that this was not enough of a cause to relocate their entire life,” said John McNamara, the PTR vice president of sales and administration.
Now PTR is marking its public statement and the private decisions that supported it with the “South Carolina Commemorative Edition Rifle,” a black-and-brushed-nickel weapon that sports engraved palmetto tree and crescent moon insignias, complete with three 20-round magazines.
“This rifle symbolizes a long journey that we’ve taken in just over a year, selling our homes, moving our families, leaving our friends,” McNamara said. “What this rifle symbolizes is all the turmoil that we’ve been through to get where we are today.”
And the freedom that drove all that upheaval, a notion McNamara raises often.
As he spoke late Wednesday, McNamara, 31, was driving to celebrate the 21st birthday of his brother, Seth, a PTR assembly worker who relocated. A third brother, Zachary, decided to stay behind and leave his position as a machine operator — after wavering.
“All three of us were scheduled to make the move, which broke our parents’ hearts,” McNamara said.
The McNamaras aren’t owners of the privately-owned PTR, though the family ties go even beyond the three brothers. Their father supplied metal for the guns through his sales job at Pennsylvania Steel Co. in Naugatuck, which lost the PTR account when the company left.
The McNamaras aren’t owners of the privately-owned PTR, though the family ties go even beyond the three brothers. Their father, John McNamara Sr., supplied steel alloy for the guns through his sales job at Pennsylvania Steel Co. in Naugatuck, which lost the PTR account when the company left.
John Sr. recalled Thursday that he and his wife, Gail, offered different perspectives to the three sons, who all grew up in Bristol, where the parents still live. “They did ask us for input. We tried to…persuade them to do what was right,” he said.
For Gail McNamara, that meant “please stay.” As for John Sr., “I told them, I said, ‘You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.’”
Like other Yankee gunmakers, PTR used a lot of local vendors in the network of metalworking that built Connecticut and keeps the state afloat today.
Unlike others, the company’s rifle, the PTR-91, is not a historically Connecticut firearm. Roughly similar in appearance to the more famous AR-15 that was used by the Newtown shooter, it’s based on the German HK-91 — a .308-caliber design that PTR bought when it acquired a Portuguese HK factory and moved production to Bristol after a U.S. import ban 25 years ago.
The gun-control bill that Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed happened to coincide with PTR’s need to enlarge and update its plant. “Instead of expanding and investing in the state where we were not welcome, we decided to go somewhere where we felt confident,” McNamara said.
“For the folks that moved down here, we’re being embraced with open arms.” That includes dropoffs by watermelon trucks, buckets of strawberries, pies and barbecue from the people of Aynor, a half-hour inland from Myrtle Beach.
PTR hired 30 local employees and agreed to maintain an average pay of at least $19 an hour in exchange for tax credits. One young worker who made the move did return to Connecticut — not unusual in the all-too-often scenario of a factory move from here to there. He’s welcome back anytime, McNamara declared.
So far, PTR is the only one to leave among the half-dozen Connecticut makers of banned firearms and magazines. Over time we’re likely to see, and are already seeing, expansion elsewhere by Colt’s Manufacturing, Sturm, Ruger, Ammunition Storage Components, Stag Arms and O.F. Mossberg.
We’ll never agree on whether semi-automatic, military-style rifles have a place in private hands, though they are not fundamentally more deadly than some handguns that remain legal. And we’ll never know whether the nation’s strictest gun ban will make the state safer. Regardless, as the McNamaras can tell you, the fallout was not just a matter of dry public policy.
PTR will celebrate the move on June 30 with a splashy rollout of the $1,200 South Carolina commemorative, when Gov. Nikki R. Haley receives a model with an “SCGOV” serial number.
All of this public sentiment and private turmoil does, of course, have a commercial side in the American tradition of mixing politics and business — made clear in the new marketing materials for the South Carolina PTR-91.
“PTR took a stand for the second amendment by moving from CT – buy a rifle that commemorates our freedoms and support a company that stood up for them!”
