Ruger Firearms: The Story of a Great American Company

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Shop the latest trends in sizes 10 through 36 now in stores and at ashleystewart.com. And we continue here on our American stories. Ruger is the biggest gun manufacturer in the country and it's not by accident. In the words of William Ruger, each firearm is built quote to a standard so I would want one even if it was made by our competitors. Here to tell this American story is Logan Medish. Logan is a firearms historian and museum professional who runs High Caliber History LLC.

Here's Logan. The timing really couldn't have been better for William Ruger when he and Alexander Sturm became business partners in January of 1949. Ruger had been making hand tools for the previous few years, but unfortunately business was not going well for him. He found himself $40,000 in debt and he was pretty much ready to close up shop when he showed Sturm a prototype of something that he was working on which hearkened back to his earlier days with military arms development. So Sturm liked what he saw and agreed to bankroll the project with $50,000 in seed money. And just like that, those two men began laying the foundation for what would become one of the largest firearm companies in the United States.

But in order to get there, you have to realize where they came from. So let's start with William Ruger. His dad was a lawyer and his mother was from a family that owned a successful chain of department stores. As an interesting aside, his great grandfather was actually a drummer boy at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Anyway, so Bill Ruger had always been interested in firearms and tinkering with designs and very mechanically inclined.

In fact, he patented his first machine gun when he was just 16 years old. With the help of his aunt who had set him up with a college fund, he ended up going to the University of North Carolina where he continued to work on arms designs, specifically a blow-forward style machine gun. While he was in college, he met a girl named Mary Thompson.

She was from a well-heeled family there in North Carolina and they got married in 1938. Bill was just finishing up his sophomore year of college, but when he got married, he quit and the two of them promptly took off for a three-month long European honeymoon. Once back in the States, Bill continued to work on developing different firearms designs and one of the things he started to do was tinker with an existing design. He took a Savage Model 99 lever action rifle and converted it into a gas-operated self-loading repeating rifle. And rightly so, he was pretty darn proud of his work, so he took it to New York City and demonstrated it to the executives at Savage and found himself rather baffled when they weren't absolutely astounded with what he had done. He was hoping they would buy the design and bring him on board as a designer and offer him a job, but that just wasn't the case.

So Bill found himself with a young wife, a newborn son, Bill Jr., an empty inheritance coffer, and no job. So he went back down to North Carolina and as luck would have it, he ended up getting a telegram that offered him a job at Springfield Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts for $32.50 a week. It was really not something he was in a position to pass up, so he took the job, but he didn't stay there for terribly long. He ended up quitting in the spring of 1940. He quit because he didn't want to end up like John Garand, who he felt was treated like a mechanical toy and was paid what he felt to be a mediocre salary for all of his contributions. Which is really saying something because John Garand is, of course, one of the greatest arms designers of the 20th century, and you or I or anyone else in the gun world would consider it an honor to end up like John Garand.

But not Bill Ruger. That was not good enough for him. He aspired to hire things. So he went and continued refocusing his efforts on his machine gun designs, and he pitched the idea to Smith & Wesson. They turned him down, but they did offer him a job. They saw his potential as a designer, and Smith & Wesson offered him a job for $75 a week, which was a nice pay bump, obviously. But Bill's pride kind of got in the way, and he rejected it, and on down the road he went to another gun company, this time High Standard.

They weren't interested, but they told him again to head on down the road and try his luck with Auto-Ordinance. So Bill went over to Auto-Ordinance, and a little while later they ended up hiring him as an arms designer, and his pay was somewhere around $100 a week. So he took that job around the beginning of World War II, and he stayed on as an arms designer for them until the end of the war in 1945. By 1946, Bill had gone into business for himself. He always wanted to be self-employed and have the freedom to do his own thing and design his own stuff, and so that's exactly what he did with the Ruger Corporation. They were making hand tools and small industrial parts, and also he was working on his design for a.22 caliber pistol. But unfortunately, like I'd mentioned earlier on, business wasn't doing so well.

The whole hand tool concept was a good idea, but it was proving too pricey for the market. So by 1949, Bill was basically flat broke when he met Alexander Sturm. Now, Sturm was an interesting guy. He was a legacy Yale graduate, and like Bill, was from a well-to-do family, and was always sporting custom tailored clothes and taking weekend trips to New York City.

While the rest of his Yale classmates ate at the cafeteria on campus, he dined at the finest restaurants in the hotels in the local area. He was kind of a renaissance man. He dabbled in a little bit of everything, including writing, acting, painting, filmmaking, and he was also a big time collector of all sorts of different things, one of which just happened to be firearms. Adding to the oddity that is the life of Alexander Sturm, this well-bred young man served during World War II with the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of sorts for today's CIA. So with that $50,000 worth of seed money, they started their company, and their first factory, and I use that term loosely, was in a small, unassuming building that they affectionately dubbed the Red Barn across the street from a railroad depot in Southport, Connecticut.

It was essentially just Bill and Alex and a couple of tool makers all working long, long hours into the night, and Bill actually mentioned at one point, he was writing the final payroll check from the initial $50,000, and they were out of cash, and he told Alex, this is the last bit of money for the original $50,000 investment. But that was okay, because they had designed this pistol together, and Alex Sturm had checks for 100 guns that were ready to be sent out into the mail, and so just like that, they were in business, the seed money paid off. Now this gun that they designed together was inspired by World War II handguns from the Axis Powers. It had a similar silhouette appearance of both the Japanese Nambu and the German Luger in certain ways. The ergonomics of those guns were tweaked a little bit to create what would become known as the Ruger standard, and the gun would go on to be lauded by shooters for generations as being well-balanced, easy to hold, and easy to shoot.

Unfortunately, the gun is a bit of a Rubik's Cube in design when it comes to putting the gun back together. And when we come back, we'll continue with the story of Ruger, the great American company, and my goodness, how it got started is like how so many companies got started, on the cheap, and almost out of business from the beginning. More of the story of Ruger, the great American gun company, after these messages. This is our American stories. Digital currency is helping to form the base layer for a new global commerce infrastructure, and stablecoins like USDC, issued by Circle, help to bring faster payments at internet scale.

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Happy streaming! And we continue with our American stories and the story of Ruger, the great American arms manufacturer right here in the United States. Let's continue with this great business story. There's a joke in the gun community that God came to Bill Ruger in a dream and showed him the design for the Ruger standard pistol, but unfortunately Bill woke up before God could tell him how to put it back together. Anyway, when the gun was first put into production and they were working on things, they had a total of eight barreled pistol receivers that they had made as test guns for this new design. And serial number three of these guns was actually the first one to leave the factory.

Serial numbers one and two were retained internally for further study. By February of 1950, Stern Ruger and company had a back order of an astounding 5,000 units and a production capacity of just 900 guns a month. By summer of the same year, the backlog had grown to 9,000 units and their production capacity had picked up a little bit, but they were still only able to make a thousand guns a month.

That backlog is a testament to that little guns rugged design and its ease of use and its affordability. Finally, finally, there was a 22 caliber pistol on the market that anyone could afford to own and that was easy enough for anyone to learn how to shoot with this gun. Within a year, that little startup company from Connecticut had gained traction and continued to advance at a rapid pace, but Alex Sturm contracted viral hepatitis and died very unexpectedly in November of 1951.

He was just 28 years old. The company's heraldic eagle logo that today is instantly recognizable as Ruger, that eagle was actually designed by Alex Sturm and so paying homage to his fallen business partner, Bill Ruger changed the color of the eagle in the logo from red to black. And with the exception of the one millionth Ruger standard pistol that they produced in 1979, it wasn't until 1999 with the celebration of their 50th anniversary that the logo would return to red on all of their guns. So even though they had the tremendous setback of Alex Sturm passing away unexpectedly at a very young age, Bill Ruger was a shrewd businessman and he didn't want to rest on their laurels and be seen as one trick pony.

So he knew that they were going to have to diversify their offerings beyond that 22 caliber pistol. Given the popularity of westerns and cowboy six guns in the 1950s, the Ruger company introduced their first single action revolver in 1953. The revolver was a instant success and the company introduced the single six, the Blackhawk and the Bearcat, all of which were single action revolvers all by the end of that decade and each one of them was a hit.

Next up, rifles. So the deerstalker, the 1022, the number one, the model 77 and so on were all added to the lineup in the 1960s. And due to the brand's success and popularity, the company became publicly traded for the first time in 1969. It would go on to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1990, but today it remains the only American arms manufacturer that is publicly traded as a standalone entity and not grouped into a larger parent organization. So they're flying high by the end of 1969.

They've been in business 20 years and now it's time for a flop. But it wasn't a gun. Bill Ruger collected high-end antique automobiles and so in that vein, he designed what was known as the Ruger Sports Tourer, which was a car based on the Bentley and it had an estimated retail price of twelve to thirteen thousand dollars. Bill read the market wrong with the car and that was kind of a rare occurrence for him.

He usually was a keen eye and knew what people wanted, but they did not want this car. So they'd only made two of them when they turned their focus back to making guns. Unfortunately, they'd already spent eight years and four hundred thousand dollars developing a car that never made it to production. Nonetheless, when they turned their attention back to guns, they did well in the 70s.

By 1979, which was the company's 30th anniversary, four of the models they offered had already sold a million units each and they finished up their 30th anniversary with sales totaling sixty eight point eight million dollars and a profit of seven point nine million, which was up like 14 percent over the previous year alone. So by 1989 and at this point in American history, the idea of a so-called assault weapons ban was really picking up steam. And so Bill Ruger wrote a letter to every member of Congress and he told them that they should limit magazine capacity instead of trying to ban these so-called assault weapons.

Taking it a step further, in a couple more years, he would sit down with NBC in 1992 and in that interview he was quoted as saying that no honest man needs more than 10 rounds in any gun. And backlash against Bill and the company was swift. Gun owners as a whole have very long memories and there are still some people to this day that will not own a Ruger firearm because of what Bill said.

Fortunately for them, you know, they make a good product and there were enough people who still rallied around the brand and they found themselves in 1999 celebrating their 50th anniversary. And by that point in time, they had really cemented their place both in firearms history and in American history. Quite literally tens of millions of gun owners had Ruger firearms in the field hunting, sitting in their home gun safes, out on the range with their kids, sitting in the gun rack in their trucks. Ruger firearms were everywhere. And over the years, Bill Ruger had the opportunity to buy a whole bunch of other companies.

Even if you don't know firearms, you still know names like Colt, Smith & Wesson, Remington, and Winchester. He had the opportunity to buy all of those companies and didn't. And it wasn't just gun companies. Beyond that, he had the opportunity to buy both Maserati, the sports car company, and Harley-Davidson, the iconic motorcycle company.

Instead, he chose to focus on his guns. By 2000, Bill was 84 years old and he decided it was finally time to retire. Now, retirement was kind of an odd thing for Bill. In 1992, he did an interview with Forbes magazine when he told him that he could never retire because he'd never done a God d*** day's work in his life.

So how can you retire if you've never worked? Nonetheless, he did retire and his son took over as chairman and CEO of the company. Bill had also said around that same time that if you rest, you rust.

And so that's why he tried to keep so active. And unfortunately, retirement meant rest and it meant rust. So Bill Ruger died in 2002, having spent 53 years involved in the operations of the company that he helped found. And his son, Bill Ruger Jr., passed away in 2018 after working for his father's company for 42 years. He retired in 2006 and so even though there's been no direct Ruger descendant running the company in more than a decade, they are definitely one of the big players on the block in terms of American firearms. The Ruger standard pistol that they initially created back in 1949 lives on today in a variant known as the Mark IV. And like the previous three versions, it maintains all of the classic appeal and lines of the standard, but it just kind of updates the platform for today's market. Most importantly, however, it solves the difficulty of takedown and reassembly. So now that Bill Ruger is spending all of his time up above with God, he was finally able to have God show him how to put the pistol back together.

And so now that the Mark IV has ironed out all the kinks in the design, the gun can remain at the forefront as an incredibly popular gun for people to learn how to shoot on, both young and old, beginner and seasoned pros alike. The humble startup that consisted of just a few guys in a red barn now has more than 1,800 employees. They're still headquartered in Connecticut, but now they've got five factories throughout the country. Alexander Sturm's $50,000 investment really paid off.

The company today is worth $940 million. And given their success, I think it's safe to say that Mr. Sturm and Mr. Ruger would have big smiles on their faces if they could see where their company is at today. And a very special thanks to Logan Medish.

Logan is a firearms historian and museum professional who runs High Caliber History, LLC. And my goodness, what a story. 1,800 employees off a $50,000 loan, two guys just, well, never working a minute in their lives, they probably felt.

And so many people who work for themselves, that's why they do it, because they have something special they want to do. And my goodness, anyone who owns weapons, who loves firearms, and responsible firearm ownership is a big deal. But he testified and went public on magazine capacity. My goodness, that took a lot of courage to do.

And he did it. Ruger, the great American gun manufacturer. Their story here on Our American Stories. Get the first 48 and 60 days in. Plus, dust off your dance moves with iHeart's Forever Disco Radio. Easily discover new free content each week across the best streaming apps.

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