Amid gun debate, firm feels marked

Maryland bill seen as threat to Beretta

— On the production floor of Beretta USA sits a hulking new barrel-making machine ready to churn out the next object of obsession in America’s love-hate relationship with guns: a civilian version of a machine gun designed for special-operations forces and popularized in the video game Call of Duty.

Beretta, the nearly 500-year-old family-owned company that made one of James Bond’s firearms, has already invested more than $1 million in the machine and has planned to expand its plant further in Prince George’s County, Md., to ramp up production.

But under an assault-weapons ban that advanced late last week in the Maryland General Assembly, experts say the gun would be illegal in the state where it is produced.

Now Beretta is weighing whether the rifle line, and perhaps the company itself, should stay in a place increasingly hostile toward its products. Its iconic 9mm pistol - carried by every U.S. soldier and scores of police departments - would also be banned with its high-capacity, 13-bullet magazine.

“Why expand in a place where the people who built the gun couldn’t buy it?” said Jeffrey Reh, general counsel for Beretta.

Concern that the company will leave, and take its 300 jobs with it, is palpable among state lawmakers who worry it could be collateral damage from Gov. Martin O’Malley’s proposed gun-control bill.

Among other restrictions, O’Malley’s bill would ban assault rifles, magazines with more than 10 bullets and any new guns with two or more “military-like” features. Gun experts said it’s a near-certainty that Beretta’s semiautomatic version of the ARX-160, now only a prototype, would be banned under O’Malley’s bill.

“I’m concerned. I think they’re going to move,” said state Senate President Thomas Miller Jr., D-Calvert. “They sell guns across the world and in every state in the union - to places a lot more friendly to the company than this state.”

In Beretta’s low-slung factory along the Potomac River in Accokeek, Md., where walls are lined with trophy heads of caribou, wild boars and black bears shot by employees, the legislation proposed by O’Malley, a Democrat, feels like an affront.

In testimony this month at the state capital of Annapolis, Md., Reh warned lawmakers to consider carefully the company’s future. Reh, who oversees the plant, pointed tothe last time Maryland ratcheted up gun restrictions in the 1990s: Beretta responded by moving its warehouse operation to Virginia.

“I think they thought we were bluffing” in the 1990s, Reh said. “But Berettas don’t bluff.”

The small U.S. division that Beretta started 35 years ago in Prince George’s has added substantial swagger to a company that already billed itself as the “World’s Oldest Industrial Dynasty.”

From behind the modest brick facade of an abandoned gun plant it purchased in 1977 on Indian Head Highway, Beretta won a landmark contract to become the standard sidearm of all U.S. military personnel in 1985. To the chagrin of American competitors, it soon replaced the venerable Colt 45.

More than a half-million of the company’s guns have been shipped to the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines, each stamped as made in Accokeek.

“We literally are part of the arsenal of democracy,” said Reh, sweeping his hand toward the production floor, where on a recent afternoon more than 1,000 of the military version of the pistol sat in various stages of assembly. “That’s why we consider this so insulting.”

To fulfill the contract, Beretta expanded the plant by the length of a football field, installed an underground shooting range and hired 500 people. By 1990, during the peak of the first Persian Gulf War, the company was the second-largest employer in Southern Maryland and had a supply chain of contractors that employed hundreds more.

Today, the company produces more than 100,000 guns annually, supplying the militaries and police of the United States and its allies, including the Iraqi army. It has shipped an additional million for purchase by private citizens, including some on display at its high-end galleries in Dallas, London, Milan and Paris. There, Beretta has turned firearms into a luxury accessory with its $130,000 Montecarlo shotguns, $1,000 hunting jackets and sweepstakes to hunt with the Duchess of Rutland.

The company’s new rifle, which it is reluctant to call an “assault” weapon, could add to that profile. It would be the first civilian version of a machine gun that is now available only to militaries, and that is configured with a clip-on grenade launcher for many special-operations units.

Beretta plans to sell the semiautomatic, .223-caliber version as the ARX-100. It is expected to sell for about $2,000.

Front Section, Pages 4 on 02/25/2013

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