As a leader of a Connecticut manufacturing business who answers to owners, I can tell you the one question I am asked regularly, "Why does it make sense to stay or grow here?"

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Colt Manufacturing’s president and chief executive officer brought hundreds of his workers to the state Capitol Thursday to make their presence felt as lawmakers tackle gun control legislation, while the National Rifle Association said it objects to background checks and wants the emphasis put on mental health.

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Colt Manufacturing emptied its West Hartford plant for a brief show of force at the state Capitol Thursday morning. Ten busloads of the plant’s employees flooded the Legislative Office Building, appealing to lawmakers to save their jobs.

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You’d expect the 175-year-old gun manufacturer that invented mass production to pull off an orderly trip to the state Capitol and that’s exactly what Colt’s Manufacturing Co. did on Thursday, as 550 employees left a clear message, then returned to work. “Save our jobs.” They piled into ten full-size luxury buses, mostly from the Constitution Coach Co., making for an appropriately labeled convoy from the factory of Colt’s and sister company Colt Defense LLC on New Park Avenue, just over the West Hartford line.

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A few weeks ago, House Majority Leader Joseph Aresimowicz, rounded up a handful of his deputy majority leaders and headed to Colt Manufacturing in West Hartford for a tour and demonstration of various firearms. In anticipation of having to vote in the next few weeks on post-Newtown gun control legislation, he said he wanted to make sure his deputies had “all the available information they needed to make laws.”

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The management and employees of three firearms manufacturers with operations in Connecticut speak out in separate television commercials that begin airing today on several cable television systems in the state, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for the firearms and ammunition industry.

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In media stories nationwide, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) and its firearm-manufacturer members continue to correct misinformation about AR-style modern sporting rifles, the sale of which would be banned and ownership severely restricted if proposed legislation is passed by federal and state lawmakers.

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The divide between Connecticut’s gun manufacturers and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy would seem too wide to bridge, but after a cordial meeting, both sides are showing some optimism. The meeting happened Monday between Malloy’s policy staff, including Mike Lawlor, the administration’s criminal justice chief, and a group of executives and owners from Colt’s Manufacturing Co., O.F. Mossberg & Sons, Stag Arms and others.

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A Mississippi lawmaker has reached out to gun makers in Connecticut and beyond in an attempt to lure them from to his Southern state. Philip Gunn, the Speaker of the House in Mississippi, sent letters to 14 gun manufacturers, including several in Connecticut, on Thursday, the day Vice President Joe Biden was in Connecticut for a conference on gun violence.

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