I have a list of dead friends too, if anyone wants to know what weapons they liked. I have huge respect for Chris Kyle, but some of these posts are taking away from guys that died fighting. Let her grieve, damn. I can't believe you guys expect to get what you pay for, but expect George to spend hundreds of hours working and give his money to someone else.
Hey Delta, first I am not seeing anyone take anything away from your friends, or anyone else who died fighting for America. May all of their families find peace, and may they all get the help they need. After I got out of the navy (served my time on a flattop, CVN70 plankowner) I worked my whole career in manufacturing. So even though I am not a gunsmith I do know a little bit about the economics of building things. I guess some of the posters might hope that George would donate all the profit to the Kyle family, but that is not how I see that it should work, if George wanted to do it then here is how I see that it might work. I do not expect George to publish his shop rate so lets just say hypothetically that George has calculated that anytime he can get $100/man hour he is doing ok so that is how he quotes/prices his work. Say in the the build of a typical Gladius he has 14 hours. That's $1,400 per rifle. Out of that he has to pay his workers and their benefits. He has to pay for electric, depreciation of equipment, taxes, and other routine business expenses. Say taken across all the guns he builds those expenses total about $1000/rifle. That leave a profit of about $400 per rifle. Given the avg price of his rifles a little less than %10. I think most of us would agree that is not unreasonable.
The math works like this. In a lot of these things most of the labor is in the setup. The making chips part of the work is pretty quick. So when the batch size is increased (say from 1 to 100) the labor time per rifle would decrease. So lets suppose that the labor hours decreased from 14 hours to 9 hours, with a batch size of 100.
In this admittedly hypothetical rifle factory, the factory owner could make his regular hourly rate and still have $500 dollars per rifle to give to the widow. For most of us in this life $50,000 is nothing to sneer at. ($500/rifleX100 rifles=$50,000) Of course this assumes that the component suppliers in this situation would participate by offering to deliver components Georges production schedule.
Even in this case not all of the benefits would be making his regular hourly rate. I can see some other potential benefits. If the factory owner in question were able to avoid promising any particular delivery date then to some extent he could schedule the work on this batch of rifles around his other work, thus doing at least some of the work in what might otherwise be idle time. Further, there would be no reason that the factory owner could not build some of his regular production on the same setups increasing his margins on those additional rifles. Now add in the good will garnered with the customer base and I think you have a win for all involved.
Of course there is no such thing as a free lunch, and a project like this is going to be a lot of work to get off the ground, and a lot more work to finish it. Many of these jobs (like negotiating vendor participation/delivery and making sure that the Hypothetical did not vanish through employees continuing to run batch sizes of one through inertia and habit) could only be done by the factory owner. This would have to come out of his time, and the energy he puts into his business.
Please note, I have asked no one to do anything, I have only described how I think it could be a good idea if all involved wanted to do it. Now only the factory owner or his accountant could calculate how much money from each rifle might be available Chris Kyle's wife, and only Chris Kyle's wife could decide if she wanted to do this.
Given the "Ventura lawsuit" perhaps prior to setting this up(if it gets to look like it might fly) Graham might comment on the funds being dispensed to a foundation that in it's charter prohibits dispensing any funds in settlement of any lawsuit.
