SALISBURY — Having earned a firearms technology degree, owned and operated a gunsmithing business for more than six years and having served in various management roles in firearms manufacturing, David Baz wants to share his experience with and knowledge of firearms with those in the downtown Salisbury community.

Baz and his wife Holli are in the process of opening a firearms retail shop, Tree of Liberty Defense, at 203 S. Main Street, with David, founder of the company, serving as the CEO, and Holli, who has a B.E. degree in education, will serve as its chief financial officer. She also has knowledge of firearms as she is an experienced shooter. 

“We are excited and ready to open,” he shared.

A soft opening is anticipated within the next week for the business, Baz said, because they would have more products like optics and gear in stock, and are awaiting final federal permitting for a grand opening.

Once the doors are open, he noted that hours of operation would be from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday with extended hours on Wednesdays, which would be until 6 p.m. Saturday hours will be from 9 a.m. to noon. However, if there are any big downtown events taking place, they would be open outside their normal business hours, he added.

Having an interest in guns growing up but never doing anything with them, Baz shared that it wasn’t until around 2012 that his interest in guns grew and “once I bought my first one, I was hooked and I dove headfirst and wanted to learn anything and everything about every possible gun I could find.”

He earned his degree, ran a business and went into manufacturing for a while, but Baz said he missed the guns and missed the gun industry. Now armed with his degree and experience in gunsmithing and noticing that there were no stores in Salisbury that specialized in firearms, he decided to open up one in this area.

There are other places here that sell guns, like pawn shops and large retail centers, he mentioned, but they do other things and don’t specialize in firearms, and those stores that do focus on them are outside the city limits.

“So I looked at it and saw that it was a very underserved market,” Baz shared, noting his reason for selecting this area.

At Tree of Liberty Defense, Baz said they will focus mainly on the sale of firearms, ammunition and tactical gear including items such as holsters, magazine pouches, extra magazines and a duty belt, and “we will be geared more to the everyday carry, the EDC, personal protection, personal defense and tactical aspect of it.”

He noted they will also partner with Red 5 Worx in Concord, which will be doing Cerakote, a ceramic base coating sprayed on a firearm, and laser engraving and laser stippling, which applies “a more aggressive grip texture” allowing one to get a better grip on the firearm.

In addition to sales, Baz said he can offer some light gunsmithing services at their business such as cleaning, minor repairs, site installations and sighting in, minor upgrades and things such as this.

“The city and the ATF deem a lot of gunsmithing as manufacturing. Being that we’re right in downtown, they don’t want manufacturing;” therefore, he cannot do any machine work or things like that, he pointed out.

Eventually, Baz shared, he would like to offer some training whether it be partnering with someone to provide the classes or develop the courses himself, plus he would need to find a location where they could shoot.

One additional plan that Baz hopes to add at the shop is to acquire their SOT (Special Occupational Taxpayer) which would, he said, “allow us to do NFA items” such as suppressors, short-barrelled rifles and shotguns and machine guns. The machine gun aspect of it would be for any law enforcement that would need any because law enforcement does purchase machine guns from time to time,” Baz said.

While trying to decide on a name for the new business, Baz shared that he didn’t want to use his previous gunsmithing one.

“I wanted to come up with something new, rebrand, because this was going to be a whole new business and starting from scratch. So I wanted to come up with a new name,” he said.

He thought about it, he noted, and the phrase, tree of liberty, came to him.

This phrase, Baz shared, comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787 to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams. In that letter, “Jefferson is quoted as saying ‘The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ The Tree of Liberty he refers to was a famous elm tree that stood in Boston before the American Revolution and where patriots staged their first act of defiance against the British government.”

Therefore, being interested in history and politics a bit, Baz said that Tree of Liberty “came to me and seemed to fit well given the current affairs with our federal government wanting to control more and more of people’s lives while continuing to strip away our God-given rights that are protected by the Constitution,” and it is also reflected in the goals and mission of the business which is to “provide a safe, knowledgeable and customer-centric shopping experience for firearms enthusiasts while promoting responsible gun ownership.”