"COLT" Has Strange Friends

Everyone knows Sen. Charles Schumer as the congressman who
hates guns more than any other congressman east of the Mississippi,
but is it so simple?[:0]
In reality, Schumer's relationship with the gun industry is
more like that of a prostitute and her john - or maybe that of an
extortionist and the victim he shakes down - than that of an
opponent. During his 1998 Senate campaign, a New Jersey gun-rights group - the Coalition Of New Jersey Sportsmen - distributed at the NRA convention a leaflet alleging that Schumer had recently taken donations from the owner of Colt, Donald Zilkha, an investment banker who bought Colt in 1994.
Federal Elections Commission public records more than
substantiate that allegation - and make clear that Schumer'shistory of getting big donations from Colt's owner was not a
one-time thing - but rather no less than three major donations:
$500 on March 16, 1996; $1,000 on Dec. 5, 1997; and another $1,000 also on Dec. 5, 1997. Zilkha's wife or some other female relative living with Zilkha also donated an additional $2,000 to the
Schumer campaign on Dec. 5, 1997. That's $4,500 to the Schumercampaign from a couple whose sole federal-level donation before
Donald Zilkha bought Colt was one donation of $1,000 to the 1988
Dukakis campaign. Only after buying Colt did Donald Zilkha get
interested in politics; since then, he has donated generously to a
variety of congressional candidates of both parties - but his wife
or other female relative living with him only gave to Schumer; she, too, evidently only got interested in politics after Donald Zilkha bought Colt in 1994.
The Colt-related donations came over an almost-two-year period
- and Schumer evidently wasn't embarrassed enough by their source
to return any of them.
What could the owner of a company whose main nonmilitary
products were pistols and AR-15s hope to get out of Schumer in
return for big donations? Most likely, Zilkha saw Schumer as
critical to the revival of a company he literally bought while it
was in bankruptcy - a problem mainly due to Colt's main line of
semiautomatic pistols being the older single-action style, rather
than the double-action semiautomatics that took over the pistol
market starting 25 years ago. Zilkha's company had literally bet
everything on an experimental pistol that would fire only when it
received a signal from the owner's bracelet - and favorable
treatment from Schumer for such pistols in legislation was likely
Colt's only hope of long-term survival. Whether Schumer
successfully pushed statutes mandating that all pistols had this
feature or whether they enjoyed tax breaks might well mean the
difference between Colt emerging as the leading handgun maker or
going flat broke; at the very least, pistols had to stay legal in
some form if Colt were to have any chance of staying afloat at all.
Did Zilkha just suddenly get civic-minded right after buying Colt, or was he just hoping every politician he donated to was the political equivalent of a prostitute? Make up your own mind.[:D]