Manufacturing in the United States has been suffering a death of a thousand cuts, with workers in many previously booming industries finding their jobs evaporating, and others waking to find their careers exported overseas. The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown that followed froze supply chains, and the fatal flaw of just-in-time production and global logistics waiting in the wings reared its ugly head. Seemingly overnight, the river of products, parts, and pieces manufactured in mainland China dried up. Facilities that relied on foreign materials didn’t have resources, and those “American” companies that simply relabel foreign products suddenly had no product at all.
This hit every industry, everywhere. Firearms manufacturing faced the unique problem of higher-than-ever demand combined with harder-than-ever logistics. “We can’t make things here — it’s too expensive” is a refrain that’s rang out since Reagan; and indeed, living wages for American workers cost more than the pennies paid to sweatshop slaves in Shenzhen. But if we learned anything from the curse of COVID, it’s that more things need to be made here.
This is what brought us to the small city of Mansfield, Ohio. Nestled off of Highway 71 right between the major metro areas of Columbus and Cleveland, Mansfield was a booming manufacturing center in the mid-20th century. Currently, the median household income of Mansfield hovers at just over half the national average, and its poverty rate is virtually double the state average. Stagflation of the 1970s followed by the transpacific
