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August 24, 2012

Who Is Buying Up All The Gun Manufacturers?


I have owned firearms from Marlin and Ruger and Bushmaster, DPMS, Colt, S&W, Baretta, Remington and more. I just heard a rumor about George Soros buying up firearms manufacturers in order to circumvent the 2nd Amendment. By acquiring these companies he will deny weapons to the American public.

I wanted to use several different sources to determine the veracity of this rumor and, apparently, it is not true.

First I used Satan's mouthpiece, the NY Slimes:
In recent years, many top-selling brands — including the 195-year-old Remington Arms, as well as Bushmaster Firearms and DPMS, leading makers of military-style semiautomatics — have quietly passed into the hands of a single private company. It is called the Freedom Group — and it is the most powerful and mysterious force in the American commercial gun industry today.

[...]Behind this giant is Cerberus Capital Management, the private investment company that first came to widespread attention when it acquired Chrysler in 2007. (Chrysler later had to be rescued by taxpayers). With far less fanfare, Cerberus, through the Freedom Group, has been buying big names in guns and ammo.
The rumor was that Soros was the puppet master behind Cerberus. The rumor became so strong that the N.R.A. stepped in and made efforts to reassure its membership that their interests were not threatened by this company.
“N.R.A. has had contact with officials from Cerberus and Freedom Group for some time,” the N.R.A. assured its members. “The owners and investors involved are strong supporters of the Second Amendment and are avid hunters and shooters.”

Mr. Soros isn’t behind the Freedom Group, but, ultimately, another financier is: Stephen A. Feinberg, the chief executive of Cerberus.

CERBERUS is part of one of the signature Wall Street businesses of the past decade: private equity. Buyout kings like Mr. Feinberg, 51, try to acquire undervalued companies, often with borrowed money, fix them up and either take them public or sell at a profit to someone else.
And here from the Illinois State Rifle Association:
Freedom Group owns a large number of firearm and ammo manufacturers. This is TRUE.

Freedom Group is owned by Cerberus. This is also TRUE.

Soros owns Cerberus. FALSE or at least highly improbable and unable to be confirmed.

This ‘warning’ started as e-mail forwards in late 2009/early 2010 when Freedom Group attempted to go public with stock and they bought up Barnes Bullets.
Cerberus was started and is owned by Stephen Feinberg. No reputable sources we have found (ie Wall Street Journal, Businessweek, etc. ) list Soros in any way connected to Cerberus. Most locations for this are online message boards or blogs that copy/paste the same or similar 'warnings' like the one above. Occasionally 'Soros & Feinberg' wording is added to them to give the alert some semblance of credibility.

So while Soros IS a gun grabber through funding such organizations as IANSA and Media Matters, it's not through Cerberus or Freedom Group.
So who is this guy, Stephen Fineberg? Who is the CEO of Cerberus Capital Management? He is a 53 year old Bronx native with a blue collar background. He is also a man who admits when he has goofed up; he has his ego under control.
In the world of private equity where there are many big egos, rarely have we seen the head of a large firm admit publicly to making mistakes. However, in a refreshing twist, Cerberus Capital Management’s chief executive reflected on past missteps during a keynote speech at the Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst conference in New York.

“One thing about the money management business is [you should] never cease to be amazed by your own ability to be an idiot,” said Stephen Feinberg, chief executive at Cerberus.
This bio outtake reveals a little more about the man:
[...]his lifestyle does not reflect extravagance as compared to his peers in the PE business. He currently resides on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with wife Gisela and three daughters.

Some of Feinberg’s hobbies are: chess, skiing, game hunting, and riding on his Harley motorcycle. Apart from being in private equity, he and his wife are also supporters of the Republican Party and other Republican organizations. He has even hired Dan Quayle, the former Republican US Vice President, as Cerberus’ chairman of global investments. Moreover, former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was one of the company’s clients.
I figure I can rest a bit easier now.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Good to know!!!
Thanks for passing this on.

tee said...

You guys should probably stop thinking of Soros as some kind of evil puppet master. He's just a guy with a lot of money who harbors political views different from yours, he's the liberal version of the Koch brothers, and like them he is interested in making money. Buying up gun manufacturers in order to deny everyone guns poses no financial benefit to him, but in fact a huge loss. The fact that you actually took this idea seriously shows how removed from reality you really are.

sig94 said...

tee -once again you lead with your ignorance and do nothing but show your ass to the world. Soros is a manipulative criminal - convicted of insider trading in 2002 by the French courts. He has built a vast network of NGO's (that's non governmental organizations to you) that on the surface are committed to various human rights causes but actually undermine them. Some of them helped support the "Arab Spring" that is now happily crucifying its opponents. Need more? See what the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information has been up.

In 1992 Soros almost singlehandedly broke the Bank of England, devaluing the pound by dumping over 10 billion sterling - he personally made a billion pound profit by doing this. Just google "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England."

And for pity's sakes get your head out of your ass, you're starting to bore me.

sig94 said...

Mark - I don't like unsubstantiated rumors that make people more fearful than they need be. There is more than enough serious matters floating around to worry us.

Things like this firearms rumor are a distraction. The real danger will not come in this fashion - the real danger is the economic manipulation that will destroy our financial lives and really enslave us.

And that's where Soros worries me because his money appeals to both Reps and Dems - greed respects no party affiliation.

tee said...

sig--

Again-- how does it profit Soros to buy up gun manufacturers and deny us all guns? Even in one of the typical right-wing paranoid U.N-martial-law fantasies, him buying up all the guns wouldn't account for the hundreds of millions of guns already in the possession of citizens.

"Some of them helped support the "Arab Spring" that is now happily crucifying its opponents"

Well, one can never predict where a popular movement will go. The US famously supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets, never realizing where that would ultimately lead. Or consider Bush trying to foster democracy in Iraq, only to have Islamist candidates get a huge portion of the vote. If you want to blame Soros for the Arab Spring, then be fair and blame Reagan for the Taliban. Of course, Reagan famously supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran as well. Funny how that works sometimes.

jay son said...

while tee maybe well versed in the liberal lie, he has obviously never read sun tzu---be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate. this is george soros exactly, a guy who helped the NAZI's in their efforts to deport his fellow hungarian jews, and self admittedly stole their property.

tee also does not understand that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. reagan was correct to help iraq fight iran. had iraq been successful, iran would not be threatening to wipe israel off the face of the map today.