Bill Rugers real problem was that he wanted the flow of cheap surplus military firearms into this Country cut off. He maintained, probably with some justification, the these impacted the sale of new firearms from Companies like his.
What was overlooked and shortsighted on his part IMO was that usually after fooling around with one of these clunkers you either had spent way too much money on it or it still didn't funtion as well as a commercially available hunting rifle.
The bottom line is that while these surplus rifles introduced many new shooters to the sport inexpensively it also provided the incentive to purchase much better commercial weapons in the long run.
Jim
