Americans and Europeans called 1816 the “Year Without Summer.” Thanks to the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora a year earlier, global temperatures plummeted. Heavy snow fell on Albany, New York, in June. That bitterly cold 1816 — the last full year of James Madison’s presidency — was also the year that Remington, the nation’s oldest gun manufacturer, set up shop in Ilion, New York, a tiny village on the Mohawk River west of Albany. Alas, in late 2023, union leaders learned that RemArms, which acquired the Remington facility in 2020, would close its Ilion plant and relocate to the greener…