Research and development within the firearms industry is mostly limited to the big guys who can afford to pay in-house inventors to innovate old products or design new ones. R&D is very expensive proposition with questionable returns.

Our largest gun companies are tiny compared to any Forbes 500 Corporation. For one of these outfits to hire a couple of genius inventors like a John Browning or Eli Whitney to come up with new ways to make metal into pea shooters so bazillions of dollars can be shoveled into the company store is a costly endeavor. The constant pressure from “bottom line” executives would tend to break the spirit of any man who needs gargantuan amounts of time to develop ideas into mechanical perfection.

By golly, there is a giant pool of men out here in “fly-over land” who are equal to and surpass the intellectual and mechanical inventive ability of any single firearms industry icon you can name. And, if you can prove me wrong I will personally saw off the limb on which I am now straddling. You want John Browning? I’ll give you Old John! He can be found in the embodiment of many members of the American Pistolsmiths Guild. These fine businessmen/gunsmiths embody the most inventive brains in the firearms industry today and could be used for research and development on a temporary basis by the big boys — for a fraction of what it takes to support an in-house inventor.