Instead of a Gun-of-the-day, today I am sharing an essay that I put together on the infamous California gun manufacturers of the 1970s-1990s.
It's worth the read and I promise there's a twist you didn't see coming at the end. Let me know if you enjoyed this. Thanks.
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Here are a couple of charts to help you follow along.
This "Ring of Fire" refers to a cluster of manufacturers in Southern California, including Bryco, Lorcin, Jennings, Jimenez, Davis, and the father of them all, Raven Arms. They produced firearms known for their poor quality, low price point, and high rate of involvement in crime. Often being made with soft zinc alloys that were easily melted or damaged. The term was coined by a researcher studying the high number of these guns used in crimes nationwide.
The term “Saturday night special” is a phrase used primarily in the United States and Canada in regards to a cheaply made, small caliber, handgun with a low price tag that was a frequently found at the scenes of drive-bys, murders, robberies, and assorted gang activities. It’s a term that has fallen out of favor in the firearm industry as the name is not intended to be a glowing term of endearment. There are dozens and dozens of various handguns that at a glance you might think qualify for this category, but there’s a distinct divide between the Saturday night special and modern quality pocket pistols.
Side note:
There is no difference between Zamak and Zamac; they are two different spellings for the same zinc alloy. The name is an acronym from the German words for its main components: Zinc, Aluminum, Magnesium, and Kupfer (copper). The spelling "Zamac" is more common in English-speaking countries, while "Zamak" is more common in Europe.
Soon George had formed Raven Arms, and began manufacturing their first product, the Raven Arms P-25. Utterly palm sized and holding a whopping 6 rounds of .25 ACP, this straight blowback pistol was made out of the cheapest "metal" known to man. You may wonder how it would create an empire so expansive that it’d earn a nickname as vitriolic as “Ring of Fire” but there’s a fundamental difference between this progenitor and any of its equally infamous descendants. It was 100% owned by George Jennings. Every single step of the process was to profit him and him alone. And so when the money would come in for the sales, it’d go straight to him. And with this business of pistols rapidly beginning to pay more than the tool work, he began expanding his company outwards. And it’d expand in a way that would fill the market with various versions of the exact same gun, and be borderline nepotistic as well.
The term nepotism was not an offhand remark here. From the beginning of Raven Arms in 1970, the Jennings family would be put in control of a variety of subsidiary companies set up around the area. George's son, Bruce Jennings, was the founder of Jennings Firearms in 1978. His daughter Gail Jennings and her husband Jim Davis would create Davis Industries in 1982. Initially, Jennings Firearms made pistols in .22, Raven Arms made them in .25 ACP and Davis Industries made cheap derringer pistols. Everything should have worked together.
It did not work. At all.
John Davis’s expulsion from the business would cause more problems that the Jennings did not anticipate. It allowed the involvement of Jim Waldorf. Waldorf, a former schoolmate of Bruce Jennings, was interested in the industry coup that Bruce’s father (George Jennings) had pulled off, and wanted to do the same. Picking up John Davis was the key in the creation of his new company, Lorcin Engineering. We’re now dealing with five separate companies, four owned by the same family and one owned by former employees.
Just as if nothing happened in the first place.
Calwestco would shut down in 1991, ceding all of it’s tooling to Bryco Arms who began to expand their line of handguns to include models in larger calibers such as .380 ACP, 9×19 Parabellum and hauntingly .45 ACP. For a straight blowback made primarily of a cheap zinc alloy, balls of steel on the engineers at Bryco. 1991 would also see the shutdown of another major company in the whole system. Raven Arms and it’s factory would catch fire in 1991, and rather than reopening it, George Jennings elected to have the tooling and equipment sold off to another company, fittingly named Phoenix Arms. George would elect to use this as his retirement excuse, giving the ownership of Phoenix Arms to his wife, his kids, 4 grandkids, and the company’s general manager.
This was them at their highest. And, while some of them suspected something would go wrong, none of them suspected what would come next.
The connection to crime could not be ignored either. A Washington Post article from 1992, citing an ATF survey, states that of a total of 21,744 guns seized at crime scenes and traced, 62% of them were a variant of a Jennings based firearm. This can be further certified with more than half of the guns destroyed by police and law agencies being a Jennings based handgun. The Lorcin L380 was cited to be the most common handgun for the ATF to have to do a trace on in 1993. This put the Ring of Fire companies in the unenviable position of claiming the worst record possible. “Total Number of Tracing Requests.”
As more and more exposes and bad press came out regarding these companies, the lawsuits began to trickle in. The Jennings pistols were not quality guns from the beginning. They were liable to go off unintentionally or simply not function at all. This was the root of their eventual downfall, and it was starting to become apparent that the "Ring of Fire" couldn’t keep the flames at bay much longer.
The real hit was in 1997 when the safety jamming problem would occur to a user, causing the gun to go off as the person was taking the gun off safe to empty it. The shot would go through a wall and kill a 7-year-old child. The case would settle and Davis shut down afterwards. They would try again with Republic Arms, but the company never took off. A new company known as Cobra Firearms would eventually buy the derringer tooling, and later on make their own versions of the classic Davis models. Seeing the writing on the wall, Sundance shuttered its doors in 2002 to no fanfare or lawsuits. Hedging its bets that it was best to go out on a quiet note rather than be sued out of existence.
Bryco Arms would trudge on until 2003 before the lawsuits and monetary awards took it down. While it was initially divided up for sale, the parts and equipment were brought up by its former manufacturing floor foreman, Paul Jimenez. Jimenez then reformed the whole company as Jimenez Arms in 2004. Production would stop in California, shifting over to Henderson, Nevada and restarting with a line of mostly Jennings style pistols. The company would be implicated in a lawsuit by Kansas City, Missouri on charges of “trafficking” the firearms illegally into the city in early 2020. This, combined with what was revealed to be upwards of 1.3 million in assorted back taxes would force Jimenez to go into bankruptcy. It’s holdings were valued at pennies and bought out by JA Industries in mid-2020. JA Industries' owner? (You should know how this works by now) None other than Paul Jimenez.
As the Ring of Fire collapsed, there was a new champion of cheap firearms on the rise. Stallard Arms founded by Tom Deeb and Mike Strassell in Ohio. Deeb had the idea to make a similar fairly cheap firearm, and had brought on Strassel as the man to make it given his machine shop knowledge. Bringing in their friend Ed Stallard, the man who became the company’s namesake, they’d develop the JS-9 handgun. Over time they would establish other companies such as Haskell Machining and Iberia Arms before merging together to form…Hi-Point.
How's that for a final twist? Many of the processes that Lorcin used to make frames would be adapted and modified by both Strassell and Deeb to make the JS-9 series. And the history of various legal issues is what lead Hi-Point to adopt a very proactive approach to managing their guns and their image. While we make fun of them for being cheap and chunky, Hi-Point guns are also solid and safe. That’s solely because of the burning legacy of the Ring of Fire.
-Legacy
In the years to follow, the Ring of Fire legacy has not entirely faded. One of the grandsons of George Jennings has become an attorney and is a pillar of gun rights in the state of California. That grandson is Jason Davis. Jason is the head of the Davis Law Firm and it is still very active in the California gun rights arena. They themselves even nod to this legacy with their blog named: "Ring of Fire" Blog.
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Thank you for joining my TedTalk.
It's worth the read and I promise there's a twist you didn't see coming at the end. Let me know if you enjoyed this. Thanks.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Here are a couple of charts to help you follow along.
-The Ring of Fire and the Saturday night special
No, we are not talking about tectonic plates around the Pacific, a song by Johnny Cash or Conway Twitty, or the weekly all-you-can-eat dinner special.This "Ring of Fire" refers to a cluster of manufacturers in Southern California, including Bryco, Lorcin, Jennings, Jimenez, Davis, and the father of them all, Raven Arms. They produced firearms known for their poor quality, low price point, and high rate of involvement in crime. Often being made with soft zinc alloys that were easily melted or damaged. The term was coined by a researcher studying the high number of these guns used in crimes nationwide.
The term “Saturday night special” is a phrase used primarily in the United States and Canada in regards to a cheaply made, small caliber, handgun with a low price tag that was a frequently found at the scenes of drive-bys, murders, robberies, and assorted gang activities. It’s a term that has fallen out of favor in the firearm industry as the name is not intended to be a glowing term of endearment. There are dozens and dozens of various handguns that at a glance you might think qualify for this category, but there’s a distinct divide between the Saturday night special and modern quality pocket pistols.
-It started with one man.
That man was George Jennings. A machinist who operated a small shop in southern California. The story goes that a short time after the 1968 GCA was enacted, he heard his friend, a pawn shop owner, lament the loss of all of his cheap imported pistols. So he had the idea to use his machine shop and develop his own small .25 caliber handgun in a size bracket that would fit the same niche and with a price to match. With his experience in machining, he was able to get his hands on the various alloys he needed to make a cheap, straight blowback pocket pistol. The star of the show was the low cost wonder alloy Zamak. An alloy known for being cheap, strong (enough), corrosion-resistant, and easily cast into complex shapes due to its low melting point.Side note:
There is no difference between Zamak and Zamac; they are two different spellings for the same zinc alloy. The name is an acronym from the German words for its main components: Zinc, Aluminum, Magnesium, and Kupfer (copper). The spelling "Zamac" is more common in English-speaking countries, while "Zamak" is more common in Europe.
Soon George had formed Raven Arms, and began manufacturing their first product, the Raven Arms P-25. Utterly palm sized and holding a whopping 6 rounds of .25 ACP, this straight blowback pistol was made out of the cheapest "metal" known to man. You may wonder how it would create an empire so expansive that it’d earn a nickname as vitriolic as “Ring of Fire” but there’s a fundamental difference between this progenitor and any of its equally infamous descendants. It was 100% owned by George Jennings. Every single step of the process was to profit him and him alone. And so when the money would come in for the sales, it’d go straight to him. And with this business of pistols rapidly beginning to pay more than the tool work, he began expanding his company outwards. And it’d expand in a way that would fill the market with various versions of the exact same gun, and be borderline nepotistic as well.
The term nepotism was not an offhand remark here. From the beginning of Raven Arms in 1970, the Jennings family would be put in control of a variety of subsidiary companies set up around the area. George's son, Bruce Jennings, was the founder of Jennings Firearms in 1978. His daughter Gail Jennings and her husband Jim Davis would create Davis Industries in 1982. Initially, Jennings Firearms made pistols in .22, Raven Arms made them in .25 ACP and Davis Industries made cheap derringer pistols. Everything should have worked together.
It did not work. At all.
-Never work with family.
Infighting would begin almost immediately between these various companies, each willing to climb over the others for every possible sale. It got so bad that John Davis, the brother of Jim Davis, would leave and open his own company by the name of Sedco Industries. However he did not escape as he was soon hit by a 45 million dollar lawsuit from George and Bruce Jennings as well as his own brother Jim Davis. Sedco was run into the dirt by early 1989 with accusations of stealing company secrets. In response, a new shell company was set up under the control of Steven Jennings, the nephew of George Jennings, by the name of Sundance Industries. It made both the .22LR and .25 ACP versions of the same Raven pistol design.John Davis’s expulsion from the business would cause more problems that the Jennings did not anticipate. It allowed the involvement of Jim Waldorf. Waldorf, a former schoolmate of Bruce Jennings, was interested in the industry coup that Bruce’s father (George Jennings) had pulled off, and wanted to do the same. Picking up John Davis was the key in the creation of his new company, Lorcin Engineering. We’re now dealing with five separate companies, four owned by the same family and one owned by former employees.
-Surely it can’t get any weirder?
Beyond even the corporate fighting between the Jennings owned companies and John Davis’s Sedco and later Lorcin, there were bigger pitfalls about to happen. George Jennings would begin the court proceedings for a six year long relationship he had with his secretary, a secretary he had bumped to higher and higher positions within Raven Arms. Bruce Jennings was even worse, a chronic domestic abuser would be detained by cops on Christmas Day, 1984 for breaking his wife’s jaw. At this point Bruce left Jennings Firearms, or rather, at least he did officially. Jennings Firearms would be turned over to an office manager and be renamed Calwestco, based in Irvine, California. His now ex-wife would go on to create Bryco Firearms, initially based in Nevada but soon production shifted over to Irvine alongside Calwestco. Then to add yet another twist to the story, following his sentence being served, Bruce Jennings would open up a wholesaler company to sell both Calwestco and Bryco Firearms. Bruce Jennings's new company was Jennings Firearms (again).Just as if nothing happened in the first place.
Calwestco would shut down in 1991, ceding all of it’s tooling to Bryco Arms who began to expand their line of handguns to include models in larger calibers such as .380 ACP, 9×19 Parabellum and hauntingly .45 ACP. For a straight blowback made primarily of a cheap zinc alloy, balls of steel on the engineers at Bryco. 1991 would also see the shutdown of another major company in the whole system. Raven Arms and it’s factory would catch fire in 1991, and rather than reopening it, George Jennings elected to have the tooling and equipment sold off to another company, fittingly named Phoenix Arms. George would elect to use this as his retirement excuse, giving the ownership of Phoenix Arms to his wife, his kids, 4 grandkids, and the company’s general manager.
-Let’s appreciate this for a moment.
Now we have six companies, all of which have ties to the Jennings family. Five of them being majority owned by members of the Jennings Family. The lone exception being Lorcin that has John Davis (the brother of George Jennings' son-in-law Jim Davis) as a co-founder. All of these companies are making the same basic firearms, in the same few basic calibers with exceptions from Lorcin and Bryco. All of these companies operate in a 40 mile radius of each other in Southern California, which is where the term “Ring of Fire” derives its origin. And these companies, combined, made around 685,934 handguns total in 1992. That accounted for 34% of the American handgun market at the time. Over 80% of the handguns made in .25 ACP and .32 ACP in America were a variant of the original Jennings Raven P25 pistol. The sheer scale that these companies had reached by this point is hard to convey, but they had done what companies like Rohm had failed to do. They had gotten the American market locked down, and they were determined to keep climbing.This was them at their highest. And, while some of them suspected something would go wrong, none of them suspected what would come next.
-A series of unfortunate evets.
The flames were on the horizon. Maryland would ban most of the handguns made by Bryco, Jennings, Phoenix Arms, Raven Arms, Lorcin and Sundance. Constant bad press from the gun industry didn’t help either, as the guns were constantly disparaged in reviews. Article after article was written ripping them a new one for constantly jamming, failing to feed, failing to eject, light strikes, unintended discharges and more. Even the press joined the bandwagon as the handguns became more and more prevalent in police evidence rooms.The connection to crime could not be ignored either. A Washington Post article from 1992, citing an ATF survey, states that of a total of 21,744 guns seized at crime scenes and traced, 62% of them were a variant of a Jennings based firearm. This can be further certified with more than half of the guns destroyed by police and law agencies being a Jennings based handgun. The Lorcin L380 was cited to be the most common handgun for the ATF to have to do a trace on in 1993. This put the Ring of Fire companies in the unenviable position of claiming the worst record possible. “Total Number of Tracing Requests.”
As more and more exposes and bad press came out regarding these companies, the lawsuits began to trickle in. The Jennings pistols were not quality guns from the beginning. They were liable to go off unintentionally or simply not function at all. This was the root of their eventual downfall, and it was starting to become apparent that the "Ring of Fire" couldn’t keep the flames at bay much longer.
-Burn it all down.
The first to go was Davis, who had already taken a loss when a Davis P-380 exploded on a range, requiring them to pay $40,000 in damages to two victims. Then in 1996 Lorcin would go under due to a whopping 22 separate lawsuits that had been leveled against them from a variety of parties, mostly involved with safety issues. While the company would go under, it’d come back around as Standard Arms, still helmed by the Lorcin CEO Jim Waldorf. Standard Arms would release newer handguns, chasing the DAO micro handgun trend of the time. However, the bad quality control would doom them once again. They tried to hang on with a rebrand as Talon Industries, but went under by 2001.The real hit was in 1997 when the safety jamming problem would occur to a user, causing the gun to go off as the person was taking the gun off safe to empty it. The shot would go through a wall and kill a 7-year-old child. The case would settle and Davis shut down afterwards. They would try again with Republic Arms, but the company never took off. A new company known as Cobra Firearms would eventually buy the derringer tooling, and later on make their own versions of the classic Davis models. Seeing the writing on the wall, Sundance shuttered its doors in 2002 to no fanfare or lawsuits. Hedging its bets that it was best to go out on a quiet note rather than be sued out of existence.
Bryco Arms would trudge on until 2003 before the lawsuits and monetary awards took it down. While it was initially divided up for sale, the parts and equipment were brought up by its former manufacturing floor foreman, Paul Jimenez. Jimenez then reformed the whole company as Jimenez Arms in 2004. Production would stop in California, shifting over to Henderson, Nevada and restarting with a line of mostly Jennings style pistols. The company would be implicated in a lawsuit by Kansas City, Missouri on charges of “trafficking” the firearms illegally into the city in early 2020. This, combined with what was revealed to be upwards of 1.3 million in assorted back taxes would force Jimenez to go into bankruptcy. It’s holdings were valued at pennies and bought out by JA Industries in mid-2020. JA Industries' owner? (You should know how this works by now) None other than Paul Jimenez.
-From the ashes.
Phoenix Arms (formerly Raven), with perhaps the most prophetic name possible, remains the only original member to survive the collapse of the Ring of Fire companies, electing to replace the MP-25 with the HP-22 and HP-25 pistols as an attempt to distance themselves from the legacy. That has worked for the most part, although they would be found negligent alongside eight other companies for “its marketing and distribution practices” by a New York City jury. That has not stopped them from making handguns, although the exact amount they are selling at this point seems to be a shadow of the glory days.As the Ring of Fire collapsed, there was a new champion of cheap firearms on the rise. Stallard Arms founded by Tom Deeb and Mike Strassell in Ohio. Deeb had the idea to make a similar fairly cheap firearm, and had brought on Strassel as the man to make it given his machine shop knowledge. Bringing in their friend Ed Stallard, the man who became the company’s namesake, they’d develop the JS-9 handgun. Over time they would establish other companies such as Haskell Machining and Iberia Arms before merging together to form…Hi-Point.
How's that for a final twist? Many of the processes that Lorcin used to make frames would be adapted and modified by both Strassell and Deeb to make the JS-9 series. And the history of various legal issues is what lead Hi-Point to adopt a very proactive approach to managing their guns and their image. While we make fun of them for being cheap and chunky, Hi-Point guns are also solid and safe. That’s solely because of the burning legacy of the Ring of Fire.
-Legacy
In the years to follow, the Ring of Fire legacy has not entirely faded. One of the grandsons of George Jennings has become an attorney and is a pillar of gun rights in the state of California. That grandson is Jason Davis. Jason is the head of the Davis Law Firm and it is still very active in the California gun rights arena. They themselves even nod to this legacy with their blog named: "Ring of Fire" Blog.
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Thank you for joining my TedTalk.
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