NEA has said their LPK's are American, not Taiwanese if I recall.
Also, I would not say NEA's rifle is being marketed as "budget". I would say premium AR's being imported are being marked up because the importers "can", or maybe they have to due to import costs. Check out US prices for a fairer comparison.
This is a very interesting point. Here, a $1000 AR seems like a "budget" option. Let me explain why I think this is a misconception:
I am willing to give our importers and retailers the benefit of the doubt and assume that the extra costs are a combination of import costs, which as we all know can be steep (especially considering that the importers need to pay not only the fees but the labour costs of the employees doing all the paperwork etc) and whatever the distributor is charging, and then the retailer needs to get paid.
I can easily imagine how a gun racks up extra costs pretty fast.
But let's think about guns available in the US for a moment.
They're built there. There is no international distributor to deal with and there are no import fees. I don't know exactly how they distribute to retailers, whether there is still a middle man or not, but if there is, they're evidently charging much less.
As a result, a Colt 6920 is about a thousand dollar gun.
A BCM AR...eight or nine hundred bucks.
A Daniel Defense...around nine hundred bucks.
A Stag...about nine hundred bucks.
LMT...you get the idea.
All of these guns...basically a thousand dollars. That's what it costs to build and retail an AR-15 when you don't have to deal with importers and exporters and distributors and so on.
Every company I have listed is building very high quality guns. There are no Olympics or Vulcans or any garbage on this list. In the US, a thousand bucks gets you an AR you could confidently use as a work gun if your job requires you to shoot people.
NEA is, I suspect, being thought of as a "budget" AR, because we are used to tacking a bunch of international charges on our guns.
But really, a domestically produced AR should cost...about a thousand bucks.
The smoking deal is the FF rail...that does make these things very reasonable. But the overall cost, when you think about it, doesn't reflect their "budget" status.
It's just the byproduct of FINALLY having a real Canadian domestic small arms manufacturer, just like they do in the States.
I hadn't really thought of it this way until reading the post I quoted. Maybe everyone else already had, but for those of us who hadn't, well, points to ponder.
As for me, I am now thinking of the NEA guns a little differently. I had already planned on making an NEA-15 my next purchase, and I think that's probably been pretty obvious. But I won't think of it as "this is a great bang-for-buck option", although that's true.
I'll probably just think of it as another serious AR, without import fees attached. I don't mind spending money to buy quality...but the money that I spend on import fees and distribution does not go in to the manufacture of the gun. It just goes in to a bank account somewhere.
If NEA continues with their program of building guns and parts and continues making them available to the Canadian civilian market, boy...I think we're going to see some real changes in the gun scene in this country. I have already been commenting on how I think the NEA guns are driving prices down across the board, and that's a big change.
But I don't think I really understood the significance of a Canadian domestic small arms manufacturer until just now.