The founder of the budget firearms company Hi-Point, Tom Deeb has recently passed away at his semi retirement home in Texas. He was 65 years old and died from cardiac arrest. Deeb founded the company in 1993 with a simple philosophy of creating a budget firearm for the firearms community. Despite much of the criticism that Hi-Point gets, to include myself poking fun at the company from time to time, you do have to give it credit for the niche that it occupies, in being low cost and reliable. Other companies have tried to bring low cost firearms to the market, and have failed because their guns were unreliable. Hi-Point on the other hand, not only produces budget guns, and for the most part, they can be very reliable. I’ve even heard some good things about their carbines as well. To date the company has produced over 2 million firearms.

Tom Deebs history is quite interesting as well, if you have time, I would highly recommend reading the American Rifleman Magazine’s interview with him on how he got the company started, and kept it going. He didn’t come from a designers background at all, rather from a mechanical working area, and envisioned brining reliable budget firearms to the market.