Ruger: The Man Who Copied a Japanese Pistol, Built America's Largest Gun Company, and Betrayed It

Ruger: The Man Who Copied a Japanese Pistol, Built America's Largest Gun Company, and Betrayed It In 1949, William Ruger started a gun company with $50,000 and a pistol design borrowed from a captured Japanese weapon. Fifty years later, Sturm, Ruger & Co. was the largest firearms manufacturer in America. Then he wrote a single letter to Congress — and the industry he built never forgave him. This is the full story: the rented machine shop in Connecticut, the partner who died at 28, the black eagle that never changed back, the revolvers that took Colt's market, the rifles that took Winchester's, the public listing, the dominance — and the one page that undid the reputation of a lifetime. William Ruger built his empire on a single principle: build what the market needs, at the price the market can pay, to a standard that makes the price feel wrong in the buyer's favor. He applied that principle for forty years without asking permission from anyone. In 1989, he applied the same instinct to politics. The industry never recovered from the surprise.