At my last job we built tons of guns daily, literally and this was normal. When the market exploded the company hired a bunch of full-time employees, rather than temps which would suggest they figured the market was simply growing and the frenzy wasn't temporary. When things slowed down, they didn't just slow down, things came to a screeching halt. This is absolutely because the market was flooded when the frenzy died down.
Now, there are hundreds of full time employees who lost their jobs because of all this.
Welcome to the business world. If you think it sucks for the employees, try being on the owners side. Sure some of the large corporations have tons of cash put away for disaster recovery, but they piss through it pretty fast. I'm not a financial guy so my numbers may be off, my info is from their investor relations. As of the close of the 2014 fiscal S&W has $68,100,000 in cash. Their operating expense for 2014 Fiscal was $108,100,000. So if sales totally stopped for all their operations, they would be able to survive for about 2 quarters. Now since they are a public company, they stock would drop and they would loose even more money..... so I would imagine that cash would dry up in what 2 months.... if that.
Take all this info with a grain of salt, like I said I'm no finical guy and I don't really understand the numbers. I pay my CFA to do that for me.