Ithaca Gun Co. Folds

Back in the 1960s, my father could not have been more proud of his Ithaca shotgun. Even when we didn't go hunting, he would find a way to bring it up in conversation. He would be saddened, as I am, by the news that the Ithaca Gun Co. has folded.

From The Ithaca Journal:

Mired in debt and struggling to compete, the Ithaca Gun Co. has ended production after more than a century in business.

"We're just tapped out, we can't do it any longer," Andrew Sciarabba, one of seven investors who own Ithaca Gun Co., told The Post-Standard of Syracuse.

Closure of the company, which had 26 employees, comes less than a year after it received $150,000 from Cayuga County for operating expenses. Ithaca Gun had missed its May and June payments on the loan, for which it had put up its equipment as collateral.

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Ithaca Gun began production in 1880, and soon became known for making affordable and durable shotguns such as the Deerslayer and Deerslayer II.

"The closing of Ithaca Gun is another sad, but not unexpected, chapter in the life of one of America's oldest gun companies," said Dave Henderson, a lifelong sportsman who writes a twice weekly outdoors column for The Journal and other area newspapers.

"This marks the third financial failure under the 124-year-old Ithaca Gun name in the last 20 years and, frankly, wasn't unexpected given the shaky status of both the company and the firearms business in recent years."

There is hope that someone will appear to rescue the Ithaca name and continue the tradition, but there's no confidence that it will occur. The company has been unable to meet its financial obligations for quite some time.

Besides burdensome debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has been hounding the company for back excise taxes. So, sadly, one of America's oldest gun companies, with no cash and no credit, ran out of options.

Retail gun dealers can now expect difficulty in selling their inventory of Ithaca products since there can be no guarantees. At the same time, those gun owners who sent their firearms to the factory for repair or refurbishment may not even be able to get their guns back. Everything is closed down.

It would be difficult and likely unfair to try and point to one specific failure that led to the downfall of the business. Obviously, it was a compilation of factors over many decades that led to lights out and locked doors. It's just as well to say that times and circumstances changed and the company wasn't able to adapt.