The liberal, famously anti-gun state of New York cost 80 people their jobs when a rifle manufacturer announced it was moving some of its manufacturing operations to Alabama.

The nation’s oldest gun maker, Remington Outdoor Co., said Thursday it was transferring production of its Bushmaster rifle and 1911 gun lines from the upstate New York city of Ilian to a new, 500,000-square-foot facility in Huntsville, Ala., WKTV News reported.

Remington is also consolidating the manufacture of five other products to the South, away from states generally perceived as unfriendly to the growing arms trade.

Republican politicians representing the Mohawk Valley area quickly blamed New York’s recent anti-gun legislation as the motive behind the move.

“Losing production lines at Remington is a direct result of the terribly flawed SAFE Act,” U.S. Rep. Richard Hanna told WKTV. “Let me be clear: Because the state banned these products, this falls directly at the feet of the governor and the Legislature.”

Assemblywoman Claudia Tenney was blunter.

“Although the SAFE Act is a direct violation of our Second Amendment rights, it is the high taxes and bloated government initiatives on the federal and state level that have left New York state dead last in business climate,” she said.

Ilian employees have been encouraged to re-apply for their jobs in Alabama, but they have not been guaranteed they will keep their positions. Ironically, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer had lobbied hard to bring these jobs from Maine just three years ago. But his vocal pronouncements of these rifles as “assault weapons” and the need to ban them reflected a rather stark hypocrisy.

A visibly upset Fran Modore, president of the local workers union, called on the governor and state leaders to build Remington a new facility in Ilian.

“If they build it, we’ll fill it,” he said to WKTV.

Under President Obama’s unwavering encouragement, liberal states have been passing more and more restrictive gun-ownership laws, a tactic that has prompted a huge increase in gun sales in America, Forbes Magazine reported. During Obama’s tenure, sales of weapons and ammunition for self-protection, hunting, target shooting and law enforcement have shot up from $19.1 billion to $37.7 billion a year, a 97 percent increase.

Remington has been manufacturing guns and rifles in Ilian since 1816