November 1851 was, by any stretch of the imagination, a remarkable month. It saw the publication of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville; a book seen by some, with its monumental ambition, as the first modern novel. It was the month that celebrated the laying-down of the first protected submarine telegraph cable, on the bed of the English Channel, foretelling an era of global communications. And, on a London day when the sky at dawn had been the colour of the Thames but was now brilliant and blue, it saw Samuel Colt standing before the bewhiskered and besuited members of the Institution of Civil Engineers in London, waiting for them to fall quiet. He had something to show them.
Like many American engineers, Colt had travelled to an England entranced by the displays of the Great Exhibition, and it was there that he planned to show off his design. What he presented fascinated the crowd: an invention with interchangeable parts. It was the Navy Colt Revolver. What captured the greater imaginations of these straight-backed and high-browed engineers, though, was that 80 per cent of the gun had been made on machines: a revolutionary departure from crafted metal gun parts traditionally lathed by hand.
By the time that Colt had finished talking, many in the room were won over to this way of mass production. The awards board presented Colt with the prestigious Telford Gold Medal, and already the use of this manufacturing process to make guns was spreading from the Connecticut River Valley, where the majority of American firearms were once made, across the US and beyond.8 This production method, defined by its extensive use of inter- changeable parts and mechanisation to produce them, became known as the ‘American System’. It was soon to be the central way to mass-produce so many things that define our modern life – cars and bicycles, clocks and furniture. And, of course, guns in their millions.
It is no coincidence that Remington once made typewriters, sewing machines and cash registers. Or that Winchester made handcuffs, dishwashers and toilet flush valves. No surprise that the inventor of the Kalashnikov rifle once dreamed of designing agricultural machinery, or that the gun maker Glock started off his life designing plastic curtain rod rings.
The principles of production were all the same – it is just that guns have a very different use than other mass- produced items. Colt was at the forefront of this revolution in production. For that reason Phil Schreier, the Senior Curator at the National Firearms Museum, Fairfax, VA has even called the Navy Colt Revolver ‘the very first product in history’.
And mass-produced it certainly was. Over a quarter of a million revolvers were made, and they soon could be found from the plains of the US to the Russia steppes, from the far tropical reaches of the British Empire to the dusty plains of the Ottoman Empire. It was a design that launched the modern gun industry – enabling firearms to be made in their tens of millions. Colt alone has sold 30 million guns since its founder filed his first revolver patent.
Nearly two centuries on, the formula remains the sam, but the product has been transformed. What began with Colt’s revolver as the prototype of mass production has metastasised into an industry where guns are not only manufactured like any other commodity but financed like one too.
Capitalism’s unstoppable logic comes with lethal power, and it seems that even politics can’t stop it.
This week, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) dropped a probe into Credova Financial, a buy-now-pay-later firm that finances gun sales. Credova is now owned by PublicSquare, a conservative marketplace backed by Donald Trump Jr, who sits on its board and holds just under 700,000 shares. Its model is unapologetic: “shoot now, pay later” instalment loans, often linked to GrabAGun, another Trump-linked venture. The market rewarded the news with an 18% surge in PublicSquare’s share price, though the rally was short-lived.
What is being celebrated is not innovation but impunity. The Biden-era CFPB had examined whether Credova’s loans amounted to predatory lending that encouraged reckless gun consumption. That inquiry has now been cast aside. Mark Paoletta, the bureau’s chief legal officer and a Trump loyalist, said the case exemplified “weaponisation against disfavoured industries”.
In truth, the only weaponisation at play is the steady financial lubrication of an already saturated gun market.
America’s gun lobby has always been adept at dressing up commerce as liberty. But in the realm of finance, it has found a new engine. Private-equity giants like Cerberus Capital Management (aptly named after the dog that guards the gates of hell) have long poured money into the firearms industry. Cerberus was once the owner of Remington, the rifle-maker whose AR-15 was used in countless mass shootings.
The pattern is familiar: finance capital extracts profits from gun sales, then insulates itself from the carnage those sales enable with plausible deniability and blaming ‘the bad guy with a gun’ (who can only be stopped by a ‘good guy’ with a gun, one hopefully bought on credit).
The CFPB’s retreat must be understood in this broader context. PublicSquare and its Maga backers do not just want to sell guns; they want to normalise the financial mechanisms that make such sales of violence effortless, even for those who cannot afford them. By reducing lethal products to credit transactions, the industry ensures demand is met with debt rather than restraint.
The risks fall on the poor, while the rewards flow to investors boasting of their defence of liberty.
For the Trump administration, dismantling regulatory oversight is a political project in itself. The CFPB, once intended to shield consumers from abusive lenders, is being hollowed into an agency that shields lenders from consumers. Cases against other firms, such as Rocket Homes and CapitalOne, have also been quietly shelved.
What was conceived as a bulwark against predatory capitalism is being re-engineered into its facilitator. This is capitalism not with teeth but with bullets.
The consequences are deadly. More than 40,000 Americans die each year from gun violence. Financing schemes like Credova’s lower the barriers to ownership, ensuring that weapons continue to spread through a society already racked by shootings. When the regulator tasked with protecting citizens instead protects the gun trade, the result is not liberty but a blood-soaked marketplace.
The gun was capitalism’s first great consumer product, and it remains its most lethal. Today’s financiers, from Cerberus to PublicSquare, cloak their profits in the language of constitutional rights and all the cold logic of finance while quietly underwriting the circulation of death.
When regulators abandon scrutiny, they are not merely withdrawing from a fight over financial fairness.
They are complicit in a system where the price of consumption is measured in corpses.
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