Are gun sales dropping? That's the question The Trace tried to answer in a recent piece.
Now, let's understand that the gun industry faces many threats, but none of them are a lack of firearm sales. We've had years of over a million firearm sales per month--and that's not an average. I mean one million or more gun sales each month for years--so the industry is making sales. But is that number going down?
Well, let's keep in mind that this is The Trace, and so it seems they did some of their typical shenanigans.
The Trace’s report last week begins ominously: “Demand for guns skyrocketed in the United States five years ago as the country grappled with COVID-19, social unrest, and a contentious presidential election. Now, that boom appears to be ending.”
The outlet then compares years of average gun sales to years of record gun sales, noting more guns were sold during years of record gun sales.
They also look at specific states, like Washington, where Democrat gun controls have banned the sale of certain semiautomatic firearms, thereby lowering the numbering of such semiautomatic firearms being sold.
And honestly, that's shady as hell.
Comparing averages to records is always going to look like something went wrong. Sure, a record can be broken, but when there were outside factors playing into things. After all, as The Trace noted, there was the pandemic. People were worried. Asian Americans, in particular, were especially concerned as we saw an uptick in hate crimes directed toward them as people wanted to lash out over the Kung Flu.
As that settled down, those external factors weren't really there, so a lot of people just didn't buy guns anymore.
Plus, they already had a gun. Again, The Trace notes this.
Which would be fine in and of itself. Those probably did play a role to some degree in the disparity of gun sales numbers year over year.
But then they decide to look closer at states like Washington that have taken as many steps as possible to discourage gun ownership and then they pretend that's somehow indicative of the nation as a whole.
I'm going to save The Trace some effort, though. I'm going to tell them precisely why gun sales numbers may tick down going forward. It's what some have termed as the return of the Trump Slump.
Austin gun dealer Michael Cargill was elated at President Donald Trump’s re-election because it meant that the flurry of firearms restrictions ordered by Joe Biden was over.
But the political win came at a cost: Gun sales are falling at his shop and across the industry because Americans, confident that White House restrictions are at bay, don’t feel an urgency to buy firearms.
“There’s no demand,” said Cargill. “People are relaxed because there’s no fear of them losing their Second Amendment rights.”
Welcome to the Trump Slump 2.0.
Background checks for gun sales fell 7.5% in December compared with last December, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group.
With no available industrywide sales data, the analysis of background checks provides a rough measure of overall firearm sales. Share prices of the two publicly traded American gun makers are down about 20% from a year ago and industry executives are scrambling to come up with new products to juice sales.
The downturn appears to be a milder echo of the precipitous drop in sales following Trump’s election in 2016. Then, gun makers had ramped up production, anticipating that Hillary Clinton would win and spur a sales boom with her support for a new federal assault-weapons ban and other measures. Instead, demand collapsed, companies went belly up, and industry insiders took to calling it the Trump Slump.
To be fair, there probably is a fair amount of a slump in sales. As Cargill notes, people are more relaxed about their gun rights, which means no one feels any pressure to go out and get something before it gets banned, restricted, or something else.
Now, I suspect that following wins like Bruen, the gun manufacturers weren't as concerned about gun bans as they were when Trump first took office--to say nothing of the fact that the polling this time around didn't look like a slam dunk for the anti-gun candidate--so they'll probably weather this one far better.
But I suspect the folks over at The Trace will read the wrong things into the upcoming downturn. Maybe they're just too giddy at the possibility of the death of the gun industry to recognize that every industry has good years and bad. Regardless, they'll likely make a lot of predictions about what it means without actually understanding the industry at all.
The Trump Slump 2.0 may be upon us, but it's still an ultimately good sign for gun rights.
Just don't get too complacent about your gun buys because your local gun store still needs the business.
