Making Guns in Montana:
Kalispell, Mont., has become the center of a growing firearms industry, particularly for high-end rifles and industrial rifle parts.
BIGFORK, Mont. — Jerry Fisher’s big and careful arms cradled a polished cutout of English walnut, which was aging in his workroom like a fine wine. The slight tapering along one edge gave a ghostly hint of its future as the stock of a handmade hunting rifle.
His eyebrows lifted as he explained the properties of this piece of walnut. “This wood will assume the moisture content of the atmosphere you store it in,” he said. “It takes five or six years to dry it.”
Mr. Fisher, 82, is a gunsmith whose exquisite firearms, decorated with designs by fine artists, have attracted customers from around the world. He built on the work of older gunsmiths here, just as younger ones hope to learn from him. He epitomizes the values of the Flathead Valley of northwestern Montana, where people grow up with, relax with and live around guns.
Since the 19th century, hunting has been a pastime in the forests that climb up the tiara of rocky peaks around Flathead Lake. Members of the growing group of high-end gunsmiths say it is the mountains, the air and the game that draw them, not the presence of other artisans. But the area’s reputation for this kind of gunsmithing has also made it a growing destination for more prosaic manufacturing of gun parts and guns — including high-end semiautomatic rifles and military weapons.
In Kalispell, the Flathead County seat, 250 people earn a living making guns or gun parts, a tenfold increase since 2005. That growth helped mitigate the effects of the recession, which was a body blow to construction, a major local employer. Another longtime industry, logging, has also withered.
Clint Walker’s company, New Evolution Military Ordnance, became one of the newest entrants in the business within the last couple of years, joining a roster of companies that included Montana Rifle, McGowen Precision Barrels and SI Defense.
Mr. Walker, who had been an editor of trade magazines covering video equipment, said Montana Rifle was “doing literally tens of thousands of barrels” for large gunmaking companies back East. “They have to slow down and stop what they are doing to help us out,” he said. “And they’ve done that. They said: ‘You guys are local. You’re family.'”
“That is a large part of the success of this area,” Mr. Walker added.
To provide trained hands for companies like these, Flathead Valley Community College started a course in gunsmithing last summer. Students learn everything from hollowing out a barrel to checkering a stock – carving fine crosshatched indentations behind the trigger both for decoration and to create a solid grip.
Jane A. Karas, a former New Yorker who is the school’s president, said the program “focuses on craftsmanship that maintains the historic values” of the area. Her colleague Susan Burch, who worked with a transplanted Oklahoma gunsmith, Brandon Miller, to teach the course, added, “You’re looking at the intersection of art and the outdoors.”
Homicides with guns are relatively rare in the area. There have been six murders in Kalispell (population 20,000) in the past 12 years, said Roger Nasset, the local police chief. His officers are never surprised to find a gun inside a car they stop for a traffic violation – and seldom bother to discuss it, much less confiscate it. Montana’s laws on gun possession are among the least restrictive in the nation.
Guns are not permitted in schoolrooms, but have been used to raise money for them. Last fall, the Stillwater Christian School earned more than $20,000 when its parent-teacher organization held a raffle for a locally made semiautomatic AR-15 assault rifle donated by Mr. Walker, a parent of two young students there.
“When we did the fund-raiser, it didn’t cross my mind, ‘Wow, we’re donating an assault rifle to a school for a fund-raiser,'” he said. It was just, ‘This is one of the No. 1-selling rifles in America.'”
Butch Hurlbert, whose daughter and teenage granddaughter were murdered with a gun near Kalispell on Christmas Day in 2010, blames the killer — his daughter’s former boyfriend — and the police, not the gun. Having a gun, he said, “is pretty much just a normal thing.”
In Montana’s Kalispell, Guns Are a Matter of Life
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In Montana’s Kalispell, Guns Are a Matter of Life
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In Montana’s Kalispell, Guns Are a Matter of Life
