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.