Lets see.....
So it costs maybe $5.00 in labor to make a precision rifle barrel, Then $10 dollars worth of steel for the entire rifle .....
Don't have a clue about metallurgy and machining, do you. Let alone business managment and economics.
The steel used for a rifle barrel is not the same grade as the 3/4" x 24" chunk of round stock you pick up at the local hardware store (which, by the way, a piece of weldable steel as described will run you more than $20 today).
And that $10 worth of labor paid the guy running the CNC milling machine for that one piece is only part of the cost. The machine itself could easily be a half million dollar unit.
So say a small firearms manufacturer moves 1000 units a month. That manufacturer has a 10,000 SF building that costs them $8,000 a month in rent. They employ maybe 30 people, including those who handle the managerial and logistical aspects of the company. With a moderate average wage of, say, $40,000/year per employee with a few benefits. that's around $110,000/ month in wages and benefits. They have maybe $2 million in equipment, perhaps on a 10 year pay-off. That's probably $20,000/month with interest. Utility costs to run the equipment is probably another $1k/month. They have insurance costs that are probably another couple grand. Then say raw materials for those 1,000 units costs them another $80,000. Figure another $5,000 for other miscelleneous expenses.
So lets do the math here
$8k rent
$110k wages
$20k equipment payments
$1k utilities
$2k insurace
$80k materials
$5k misc.
That's $226 per gun, just to manufacture. Now figure in advertising, taxes, licenses, shipping, etc, etc. Probably closer to $250 per unit. That unit is then sold to distributors with enough of a markup for the business to be profitable, say $300 per unit. The distributor then tacks on $50 each for dealer price, plus $20 in shipping. Then the dealer marks the gun up 20% for retail. You now have the final retail price at , say, $449.
Now I pulled all these numbers out of thin air, but with a decent understanding of what it costs to run a business and how much equipment and supplies cost.
That $450 gun nets a profit for the manufacturer of about a half million dollars per year (which is maybe split between 2-4 owners) and pays 30 people $40,000/year. Not astronomical numbers, by any stretch. Certainly not the kind of money big wigs are making in the world of electronics you used for comparison.
A manufacturing company can very easily have overhead, materials and wage expenses that gobble up 70% or more of the gross income.
Also, it seems to me that designing and manufacturing a firearm, or a rifle scope for that matter is nothing compaired to the costs and skill involved in making something like a hard disk drive or a digital camera which are sold for less than $50.00 retail.
All the digital toys you have are produced by a combination of simple robotics and low cost assembly line labor done overseas. Parts are molded with pennies worth of material, and done by the millions. Do you know how little it costs to manufacture a processor? And if guns were built to the same quality standards as tech gadgets and computers are, people would be maimed and killed every day from component failures.
Even with the high tech, precision equipment used to produce modern firearms, you still have skilled workers doing fitting, assembly and finish work. Then you have people inspecting and testing
each and every unit before it leaves the factory.
Firearms are in a very different league from virtually all other commodities. The quality of even the cheapest gun surpasses that of most other goods on the market today.