"The future of the chairman of handgun maker Smith & Wesson was in question on Thursday night after it turned out he knew more about guns than the company might have liked: he once carried out a string of armed robberies holding a sawn-off shotgun. James Joseph Minder's criminal past emerged this month in newspapers in Detroit and Arizona, which reported he spent 15 years in prison in the 1950s and 1960s for the robberies and an attempted prison escape. Mr Minder was quoted by a Massachusetts newspaper on Thursday as saying he had voluntarily resigned at a directors' meeting on Monday as he felt it was "the best thing, given the circumstances"."