These are the instructions that Bryco tried to hide, better known as the instructions that couldn’t be followed because the gunmaker changed the safety design to hide the gun’s feed jam flaw.
Category Archives: regulation
Latest excerpt from Move To Fire
Continuing from Chapter One:
Twenty-four hours before the shooting, and six-hundred miles south, in Anaheim, California, a fax was transmitted from Brown & Wilcox, a commercial insurance underwriter, to an agent at an insurance brokerage, regarding Bryco Arms, the manufacturer of the Bryco Model 38.
Bryco had just come off of a good year, with $7,000,000 in sales from 1993-1994, and $14,000,000 sales projections for the next year. The small, privately owned company held the top spot of the small handgun industry. Sales for the Bryco Model 38 were more than $2,500,000 dollars. But the company had been negotiating the cost of liability insurance. The current policy had officially lapsed on April 1st. The new policy would be almost $250,000, an almost $40,000 increase.
Bryco Arms and other small handgun manufacturers were seeing increasing premiums across the board. Market forces, changes in gun laws, especially in California, growing anti-gun sentiment, bad press and a slow but steady rise in litigation against gun makers had insurance companies re-evaluating their clients. The makers of small guns were serious liability risks, and the insurance companies that continued to insure handgun manufacturers had increased premiums and narrowed coverage. As Bryco Arms’ policy neared expiration and the company shopped around for a new policy, three major insurance companies declined to quote coverage for the company.
Bryco Arms negotiated with its insurance agent until the liability coverage expired on April 1, 1994. An offer was made to extend coverage until April 8th, for an additional $8,000, but, as the broker noted on an April 5th fax to the commercial underwriter, “…it is my feeling the insured will not be renewing with us. He feels the cost is too high…”
And so, two days before seven-year old Brandon Maxfield had been wheeled into his small town’s emergency room, closer to death than life, unable to breathe on his own, his spine shattered just below the base of his skull, the manufacturer of the Bryco Model 38 had chosen to ‘go bare’ — Bryco Arms was now without insurance to compensate anyone injured by a defective Bryco handgun.
Good Morning America
This is the old trailer for a proposed documentary about the Move To Fire story; at the time it was called Showdown. Great overview for the book, frankly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gQn740ZvpU
The second excerpt
Here’s your second Move To Fire excerpt, lightly edited. A bit long, also from the book’s foreword, but this will give you all an insight you almost certainly didn’t have about what it means to have certain guns on the streets:
“…[Move To Fire] corrects misconceptions about what happened to a little boy… why it happened, and recounts how the unwavering work of one man resulted in a measure of justice for a family, and a society, unjustly wounded by the status quo.
But underlying it all is something so crucially relevant yet widely unknown that without it there would be no Move To Fire story.
…consumer products are regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission… to protect the public against unreasonable risks of injuries and deaths associated with consumer products.
But not if that consumer product is a gun…
…there have been and are defective guns that can fire without the trigger being touched, but they cannot be recalled or taken off the market except by the manufacturer… And no government entity can force a gun manufacturer to recall or remove all those models.
So, the worst extension of all this is that an unethical gun manufacturer could choose to create and sell a gun it knew to be defective, and, still, no entity could stop that from happening.
That happened.”
Move To Fire excerpts — here’s the first
I’ve been thinking that posting some short selections from Move To Fire might be both interesting and enticing (I figure you’ll let me know…). I’ll do this every week or so for, well, at least a while. Hope you enjoy or are enticed to find out more. Seems logical to start at the start, so here’s the first from Move To Fire’s Foreword:
“Move To Fire is an only-in-America story. The people in it are all of us — parents, kids, business people, lawyers, good people, and bad people. There are guns, an accidental shooting, and a lawsuit. It’s an American trifecta. It’s out best, our worst, and exposes how little we may actually know about things for which we voice our opinions, sometimes voiced at the top or our lungs.”
From “Move To Fire – A family’s tragedy, a lone attorney, and a teenager’s victory over a corrupt gunmaker,” available from Amazon, Apple’s iStore, and Barnes & Noble Online.
The release of Move To Fire
My book is now available. I am proud of the work, still marvel at the story, and I’m grateful to the people who allowed me to share this with everyone:
Click here for Move To Fire on Amazon.
It’s a slow rollout, and it may be buried under the plethora of books heavily promoted as gifts for the holidays, but, hell, it took almost eleven years to get it here, so a slow rollout, while occasionally frustrating, almost seems appropriate. I’ll add more bookseller links as distribution expands, and I’ll also use this site to share much about this next phase of the process: reviews, reactions, promo and publicity, etc.
Due to the subject matter — lawyers, guns, and money — I’ll heavily moderate all posts and comments. I’ll allow the full range of viewpoints, but I will also not allow the kind of base, crude, and aberrant type of comments that are always shared (yep, always) by those who have an established, unwavering position on guns, gun violence, gun regulation, and the Second Amendment. The vitriol written by trolls from the safety of their hovels can be repugnant in ways decent folk can’t imagine, as is documented in Move To Fire.
I also look forward to hearing from those who want to explore fact vs myth, accuracy vs rumor, and… you get the point, I’m sure.
Talk to me, tell your friends about this, and no matter what side of America’s guns issue you’re on, recommend this book to every woman, man, and young adult. Obviously, I have to do what I can to succeed commercially, but I have always felt that the Move To Fire story will assist people in their efforts, in OUR efforts, to establish a DMZ of reason and awareness as we work toward a solution to America’s gun problem… because there IS a problem, and one of Move To Fire’s attributes is the underlying lessons of how to find solutions and create change.
Move To Fire – A family’s tragedy, a lone attorney, and a teenager’s victory over a corrupt gunmaker.