Colt's Manufacturing Company

Colt's Manufacturing Company has been building firearms in Hartford, Connecticut, since Samuel Colt patented his revolving pistol design and founded the company in 1855. Few names carry as much weight in American gun history, from the Single Action Army revolver that became a fixture of the nineteenth-century frontier to the M1911 pistol, which served as the US military's standard sidearm for most of the twentieth century and is still described by the company as the longest-serving military and law enforcement handgun design in the world. That long run of relevance has not been uninterrupted. Colt filed for bankruptcy protection in 2015 after losing ground on military contracts, restructured, and emerged in 2016 under new ownership, a reminder that even a name this old is not immune to the same competitive and cost pressures that have squeezed other small arms makers.

Colt's modern business centers on the rifle family that grew out of the AR-15 platform it commercialized decades ago. The M16 rifle and its M4 carbine variant became the standard shoulder weapons of the US military starting in the Vietnam era, and Colt has manufactured versions of both for the Army and allied forces for decades, alongside civilian semi-automatic AR-15 derivatives sold to sport shooters and law enforcement. On the handgun side, the company still produces the 1911 pistol in modern configurations, continues to make the Colt Python revolver that built its reputation for accuracy and finish among collectors and shooters, and keeps the Single Action Army in production largely for the historical and collector market that has never really gone away. Colt was acquired by the Czech firearms group Ceska zbrojovka in 2021, which renamed itself Colt CZ Group the following year, folding the storied American brand into a European-owned firearms conglomerate that also includes CZ pistols and rifles.

Under that ownership, Colt operates as part of a larger group rather than as an independent public company, and it retains Colt Canada as a subsidiary, which manufactures the C7 and C8 rifle variants used by the Canadian Armed Forces and other NATO customers, giving the Colt name a second manufacturing base north of the US border. Colt's federal and military business today is smaller relative to its competitors than it was during the decades it held sole-source M16 and M4 contracts, since the Pentagon opened those competitions to other manufacturers years ago, but the company remains a recognized supplier of rifles, carbines, and pistols to US and allied militaries as well as to law enforcement agencies and civilian buyers.