GUN TOWN TROUBLES
At first he thought it was an umbrella. But when the gun pointed at John Seymour went off, hitting him in the back and the wrist, he thought he was going to die in his own barbershop.
He fell to the floor and played dead as the gunman shot three of his customers, killing two of them. Then the shooter, a former customer, killed two men in a nearby oil-change shop, and holed up in an abandoned restaurant, where he later died in a shoot-out with police.
Nearly 10 years later, Seymour thinks constantly about the shooting. “To this day, anything goes, Bang bang! and I jump. What do you expect? I had a guy die on top of me at my barbershop,” says Seymour, 76, who is known locally as John the Barber. “We never thought we’d be a mass-murder part of the country.”
But like just about everyone else in Ilion, N.Y, a small town in New York’s Herkimer County about 80 miles northwest of Albany, Seymour has a soft spot for Remington Arms, the gun manufacturer that has been located here since Eliphalet Remington started making firearms in 1816. Remington’s imposing red brick factory looms over Main Street. Walk around downtown, past the vape shops, the peeling multifamily homes, and the Remington Federal Credit Union, and you can hear the clinking of steel being cut as the factory churns out orders.
People here don’t talk about how Remington’s version of an AR-15—made in Ilion—was used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting less than 200 miles away, or that the company filed for bankruptcy twice between 2018 and 2020, because of alleged financial engineering by the private-equity firm that bought it in 2007. They also don’t talk about how the company regularly threatens to leave New York and move somewhere cheaper, or periodically lays off hundreds of workers, leaving some in limbo for months or years. What they do talk about is Remington’s proud history of making arms for America when the country needed them most, like during World Wars I and II—when workers had to carpool to the factory because the parking lot couldn’t fit everyone’s cars—and the affinity they have for a company that employed most of their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers.
“They help the little village of Ilion and its 7,500 people,” says Seymour, who when he isn’t plying his trade as a barber moonlights as a wedding and event singer. His father worked at Remington for 43 years, beginning in 1932, and
