Dear Friends,

I should probably start by thanking you for your fine line of products, especially the XD platform. My wife’s go-to gun is the Sub-Compact 9mm. I prefer the .45 Tactical. My father-in-law shoots an M1A regularly, and I have friends and readers who swear by your new Saint.

That said, as a loyal customer it pains me to watch what you’ve been going through over the past week. You seem to be hell-bent on ripping the scab off of your self-inflicted wound every single day.

You are making a bad situation much worse.

Please allow me to offer some advice — throw you a lifeline of sorts — as you appear to be in dire need of some outside counsel.

First, stop sending out BS press releases — period. You’ve clearly underestimated and insulted the intelligence of the gun community and, folks, American gun owners are a damn savvy bunch. They see right through your recent missives, which appear to be nothing more than sleight-of-hand and misdirection. They imply you’re more interested in fixing the blame than fixing the problem. Besides, you can’t press-release your way out of a crisis. Trust me: I create crises for a living. I’ve seen many, many crisis management schemes and ploys. Yours is by far the worst. In fact, it’s laughable. Springfield Armory has become a punchline for an ever-changing series of jokes.

Second, your senior leadership team has got to go. Whether they knew or didn’t know that your lobbyist was funneling funds to anti-gun politicians is now moot. Their fate was sealed the instant the first Springfield Armory dollar was thrust into a politician’s greedy mitt. Mr. Reese et al should be looking for work by close of business today. In truth, they should have been let go once the story broke. There’s no excuse for what occurred on their watch and, for them, there’s no coming back.

Third, you need to do everything you can to insure that Illinois SB-1657 goes down in flames. Your fate is intertwined with this horrible legislation which, among other bad things, would require Illinois gun dealers to be licensed by the state. You can’t spend enough. You can’t rally enough and you can’t lobby enough to defeat this legislation. If it’s signed into law, make sure to shut off the lights and lock the door on your way out.

Fourth, once you’ve regrouped, you should issue a genuine apology as well as a fully transparent account of exactly what happened — who did what, when and why — something your current management team is incapable of doing because of their complicity in all the badness.

Will this work? Who knows. It can’t hurt. Gun owners are a forgiving bunch, but there are limits to their largesse. I’ve already heard from many readers who say they will never buy a Springfield Armory product. I’m not quite there yet, but unless you take major steps to fix what you broke, I’ll be joining their ranks along with, I’m sure, many others.

Lee