As others have said, moving manufacturing production and all the machines (both production and inspection ones) a thousand miles away is not simple or cheap, nor is finding replacement workers, but when one of your most profitable products in the AR-15 is being banned from being manufactured you really don't have much of a choice, not unless you're willing to just accept money being taken away from you.
It also doesn't help that in the next couple years Mass minimum wage is moving to $15/hr. Now, most of the machine operators probably make that now, but secondary ops like assembly and polishing... they're $12-13/hour employees who will magically be getting a pay raise. S&W will not just be able to keep making money, but actually save some in labor by moving.
This partial relocation is just the beginning because once S&W gets set up in Tennessee for making AR's, they'll probably move the pistol production there too and after that it'll be the revolvers; all of this is going to take a good 10 to 20 years until completion and full relocation.
And after seeing NY state AG go after the NRA, gun companies in big blue progressive Democrat states like Massachusetts and Connecticut got quite the wake up call realizing that state governments will be used to go after them in an attempt to bankrupt them with lawsuits.
Watch Ruger over the next year or two pull their HQ out of Connecticut, that will be easy since they don't produce anything there, it's easy to pack up computers and leave.
What's not easy once a new production building is found or built is getting the workers with skills. While CNC has made things faster and easier to produce machined parts that doesn't mean there isn't a learning curve and you can just drop anyone into being a parts loader/machine operator; for a bright, young worker they can learn the job in a few months, for a crusty old dumb drunk it'll take him twice that to get up to speed and be able to make good parts consistently.
That's when they're being trained by current employees who know what they're doing, move operations to places people can't go and have soulless salary engineers who work 60 hrs a week doing the training and you'll be lucky if you can keep the operators for more than 3 months before they quit and get a better job.
That's another key factor with finding people: there are always better jobs available. It's not like the 60s, 70s, or 80s anymore where you could go work in manufacturing and make big bucks, everything is cut to the bone now and a race to the bottom. You may be able to find good people, but after a couple years they'll get the experience they need and move on to another job down the road that pays them 5 grand more a year and that's something S&W or any other gun company is going to pay because, while they're not union, every position in production pretty much has a top rate that once you hit the ceiling, no matter how good you are, you won't get paid.
This is the reason I've worked with multiple people who left Ruger: they went from making $11/hr to $14/hr overnight by taking a different job. It leads to a constant revolving door of production employees and while QC may reject batches of parts, management needs orders fulfilled and will use them so they can ship guns anyway.
These are problems that gun companies deal with now, throw in the issues of relocating and they become worse.
I wouldn't be buying any S&W AR's for a while.
