In 1995, when Ryan Busse began working for a tiny gun company called Kimber America, he believed that the gun industry and the NRA embodied wholesome values. “Those were still the days of magazine covers featuring the warmth of father-son hunting trips,” he writes in his new book, “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America.”
Busse, who moved to Montana in 1996 to become Kimber’s vice president of sales, believed Kimber’s guns were for self-defense, hunting and target shooting. From the mid-1990s until his resignation in 2020, he helped develop the company and often met with gun-lobby leaders.
But during this time, he gradually saw the gun industry abandon its traditional norms of safety, instead spreading fear and conspiracy theories to sell military-style assault weapons designed to kill many people quickly. Busse’s book is the story of a man who refused to change his values as the NRA and much of his industry, blinded by profits, became a dangerous extremist force.
While working in the industry, Busse admits, he did things he regrets. In 2000, for example, he helped the gun industry boycott gunmaker Smith & Wesson when its CEO Ed Shultz agreed with the Clinton administration to put trigger locks on all of its guns, develop guns that only authorized users could fire and take steps to prevent the company’s dealers from selling guns illegally.
These common-sense steps enraged the gun lobby. Busse and other gun executives told their dealers to...
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