(HorizonPost.com) – The Remington gun factory that has been operating in upstate New York for nearly two hundred years will be closing its doors in March 2024, leaving more than 250 union workers without a job, the Associated Press reported.
In a letter to union officials on Monday, RemArms announced that it will close its Ilion, New York facility in the Mohawk Valley on or around March 4, 2024, according to the Utica Observer-Dispach.
The company said that it did not make the “decision lightly” to close down the plant that currently employs about 270 unionized workers.
The oldest American gun manufacturer, Remington Arms began making flintlock rifles in the Mohawk Valley in 1816. The Ilion factory dates back to 1828, though many of the current buildings at the facility were constructed in the early 20th Century.
Following the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, the Remington plant in Ilion faced temporary closures, and the company’s future was threatened by bankruptcy and legal pressure.
RemArms no longer manufactures the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle like the one used in the Sandy Hook shooting.
Remington’s business, including its facilities in Lenoir City, Tennessee and Ilion, New York, was purchased in October 2020 by a group of investors known as the Roundhill Group LLC for $13 million.
Roundhill announced in 2021 that it planned to move the company headquarters to Georgia.
In a statement responding to the closure of the Ilion plant, United Mine Workers of America International President Cecil E. Robert described the news as “disappointing.”
Robert said the union workers at the Ilion plant enabled Remington to “rise from the ashes” after it filed for bankruptcy. He said without its union employees “and their dedication to producing the best firearms in the world,” RemArms “would not exist.”
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