No buyer for makers of John Wayne rifle

Despite a two-month search for a buyer to take over the historic US Winchester rifle factory, the plant will close at the end of the month, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano said tonight.

City and union leaders scrambled to find a buyer in January after the Herstal Group, a Belgian manufacturer, said it would close the US Repeating Arms plant, the Connecticut assembly line that produced the “The Gun that Won the West".

John Wayne made the Winchester a signature of his movies and Chuck Connors posed menacingly with his Winchester on advertisements for the television series The Rifleman.

“It’s going to go dark,” Mayor DeStefano said tonight, adding: “There’s no buyer, no closing, nothing that puts this together that soon.”

DeStefano said negotiations over the plant’s future continue. Earlier this month, he offered to buy the plant for 1 dollar and promised to excuse $17 m (€14.6m) in taxes and contract penalties that lawyers say Herstal will owe New Haven and the labour union when the plant closes.

Herstal CEO Philippe Tenneson rejected the deal and, in a letter to the city last week, disputed its financial calculations. Tenneson also said the company has lost millions on the factory in recent years.

More than 19,000 Winchester employees worked in New Haven during World War II, but after years of a softening firearms market, the plant now employs fewer than 200. All will lose their jobs when the plant closes.

Negotiations to find a new owner are closely tied to discussions over the future of the Winchester name. Herstal wants to discontinue the traditional rifle but keep the name on speciality weapons it produces overseas.

“We want to give Winchester a new future, not looking over our shoulder at the past, at the products with which we lost a lot of money,” Herstal spokesman Robert Sauvage said today.

Without the Winchester name, however, New Haven’s factory is not believed to be as attractive. DeStefano hopes a new owner will restart the assembly line under the Winchester name.

The Winchester model 1873 lever action rifle, popular among American frontiersmen at the end of the 19th century for its reliability, inspired the 1950 James Stewart film Winchester ’73.