The Firearms Blog is claiming that AR manufacturer LWRC is being purchased by Colt:

A well placed source just told us that Colt is buying LWRC for $60 million. The deal is supposed to close on 1 March. The Maryland company may relocate to Florida or Texas and the LWRC M6 Individual Carbine (M6IC) rifle will become a Colt branded product.

TFB has more details at the link above.

The sale, if confirmed, would confirms a hunch from Jon Stokes of AllOutdoor:

This past December there were rumors on AR15.com about a possible sale of LWRC to Colt. Apparently, any questions about a possible LWRC sale that were posted on the LWRC board were deleted by the mods within minutes, and in general there’s a sense that something’s up.

Now we can add more fuel to the fire with some new revelations. Recent inquiries from AllOutoor to LWRC regarding possible advertising and T&E rifles were met with some pretty bizarre responses, which stated that the company is currently prohibited from entering into any “contracts, obligations, or expenditures.”

Having sold a company myself before, I know exactly what the above means: it means that LWRC is almost certainly in the final stages of talks with a buyer.

As of 9:00 AM Friday, Neither Colt nor LWRC has confirmed the deal.

On March 1 of 2013, Darren Mellors, Executive-Vice President of LWRC, warned Maryland legislators that ramming through new citizen control laws targeting their products would force the company to move, costing Maryland 300+ jobs.

To understand the consequences of passing this legislation, you must know what is at stake. LWRCI’s rate of job creation over the past 7 months has been approximately 10 new jobs per month. The number of direct employees who will lose their jobs as a result of relocation exceeds 300, with a workforce that lives in five distressed Maryland Counties. This does not take into account the subcontractors we use in Maryland who will lose revenue when LWRC leaves the state.

What does losing 300 jobs mean to these distressed counties? The entire Eastern Shore of Maryland (nine counties) has a population that is less than Anne Arundel County. Our workforce resides in five counties that combined have a total population of 251K and these counties cover 1962 square miles. To make a comparison, Anne Arundel County – our nearest, non-Eastern Shore county – has 544K population and covers 414 square miles. Losing 300 jobs in the five counties our workforce lives in, would render the same impact as Anne Arundel County losing 648 jobs. – only Anne Arundel County is a region where residents have access to jobs and higher populations in surrounding counties. Our workforce doesn’t have that luxury. They come from the regions with the highest unemployment – two of our counties, Dorchester and Worcester ranked #1 and #2 in unemployment (16% and 10.6%) for the entire State of Maryland in 2012.

The direct jobs that would be lost if LWRC was move out of state belong to the least of your Maryland brothers and sisters. These are people and communities that have access to very few resources, who can’t simply drive to another county to find another job.

LWRCI will bring in excess of $130 million dollars into Maryland this year. This money is put to work in Dorchester County, one the most economically distressed Counties in MD, and the money is spread throughout the state through subcontract work to Maryland businesses, the purchase of capital equipment and technical services, the rental of properties, contracting construction for expansion, employee’s payroll dollars and corporate taxes. The millions of dollars we bring from outside of MD into the state do more to stimulate the economy than any scheme legislators or members of the State and Federal executive branches ever could.

We have invested every dollar back into expansion and growth. We invest in our employees, training them in high tech skills like machining, programming, drafting and other skilled jobs. We use the Maryland institutes of higher education offering tuition reimbursement to our employees. Our goal from the first day of operations was to expand and build something of value, not take annual dividends. We have invested in Maryland, our communities, and its people.

It seems obvious now that this was not an empty threat, but a sincere promise of things that must be in Maryland insisted upon infringing upon the constitutional rights if its citizens.

Maryland’s anti-gun Democrat-dominated Legislature and Governor Martin O’Malley have cost the state another 300+ jobs, on top of the 300 jobs they lost to Tennessee when Beretta fulfilled its promise to move a planned expansion of its facilities out of state because of the same short-sighted legislation.

The exodus of gunmakers from the “slave states” that restrict your Second Amendment rights to “free states” that value all of the Bill of Rights considers to snowball.