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How Long Will the Gun Industry Survive?

February 26, 2024

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              Yesterday I received an email from Bud’s Gun Shop with their latest specials for my review.

              Buds happens to be one of the largest online sellers of guns and ammunition, so when they set a price on any item, you get a pretty good idea of which way the gun market is going.

              You should know, incidentally, that for all the talk about how we have to protect ourselves from the Rio Grande ‘invasion’ and the terrorist threat from whichever group has qualified as leading the ‘terrorist-of-the-month-club’ gang, gun sales happen to be flat and are almost 50% lower than they were at the beginning of 2021, when everyone needed a gun to protect themselves from Covid-19.

              So, in rolls an email from Buds who wants to sell me an AR-15 for $449.99. The gun is made by an outfit in Texas, Radical Firearms, which sells both complete assault rifles and separate components if you want to build your own gun.

              Back in 1978 I bought my first color TV and my first assault rifle at more or less the same time, although obviously from two different stores. The TV was a 15” Zenith which cost me $300 bucks. The AR was a Colt Sporter which ran around $600 bucks.

              Now let’s do a little math.

              Adjusting for inflation, the TV should have cost me $1,419 this year. Wal Mart is selling a 30-inch flat screen color TV for $429.95.

              As for the gun, the $600 that I paid in 1978, adjusted again for inflation, should now cost me $2,838.19.

              The differential for the TV is $989, for the AR, it’s $2,388. Now maybe you understand that if you want to make a million in the gun business, you should start with two million.

              Back on July 2nd, 2021, when the Pandemic gun craze was at its highest, a common share of Smith & Wesson stock sold for $30 bucks. This past Friday, that same share closed at $13 and change, which I the price the stock has been fetching for the last couple of years and was also the price before the Pandemic got every gun nut more nuts than usual.

              For all the talk about how guns represent a big threat to public health, and for all the noise about how we need to enact more restrictions on gun owners in order to prevent guns from getting into the ‘wrong hands,’ I’m increasingly convinced that we are looking at a technology, an industry and a bunch of products which will soon become like the dial-up telephone, a memory for those of us who were born before the mid-point of the 20th Century.

              Evey time I walk past the Apple store in my local shopping mall, I am not only impressed by the number of customers, most of whom are under 30 years of age, but I am even more impressed by the degree to which every, single kid above the age of 12 seems to be walking around with an iPad, an iPhone or a droid.

              Know who bought all those guns that sold like crazy until the Pandemic went away? The same people who already owned guns, no matter what the gun industry or the public health gun ‘experts’ say.

              And if there were any new customers who walked into gun shops the last couple of years, they bought one gun, walked around with it for a week or so, got tired of always having to keep it concealed, then stuck it in a drawer and by now don’t even know which drawer.

              The latest surveys indicate that most American parents will give their children a phone by the age of 12. That’s a guaranteed market of new phone consumers alone between 5 million and 6 million kids.

              There’s a company in Massachusetts called Bryna, which makes and sells what they call a less-lethal gun that shoots a round projectile which contains a very potent chemical mixture which creates the immediate sensations of pepper and tear gas when it hits. The gun is accurate out to 60 feet and costs $379.

              And by the way, you can get one of these guns directly from the manufacturer without going through any kind of background check because the product doesn’t require any propellant (a.k.a., gun powder) which means it’s not a gun.

              It looks like a gun, it disables a human target like a gun, but it’s not a gun.

              If this company or some other company figures out how to make and sell this gun for under $100 bucks, they’ll put just about every gun company out of business in five years.

              Think it won’t happen? I remember seeing my first touch-tone phone at the New York World’s Fair in 1964.

Bye-Bye NRA? Not So Fast.

February 25, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , 2 Comments

              Any of my friends in Gun-control Nation who thinks that the NRA will be out of business because a New York jury has told Wayne-o and Wayne Phillips to repay $6.4 million they stole and squandered over the years, better think again. Sorry folks, but guns and gun owners aren’t about to disappear from the American scene.

              Back in the 1980’s, I was one of a group of Smith & Wesson distributors and dealers who spent a weekend at the factory in Springfield reading a very detailed marketing survey which the company had commissioned to learn who was buying and owning their guns.

              The iconic gun company sold several hundred thousand guns every year but sold almost all of them to 30 or 31 national wholesalers who then sold the guns to retailers who then sold them to gun nuts like me.

              So, when S&W discovered that the handgun market it had taken away from Colt after World War II was now being taken away from them by the European imports like Sig and Glock, they hired a marketing company to interview three sets of consumers: people who owned their guns, people who owned guns made by other gunmakers and people who didn’t own guns at all.

              Want impressed me more than anything else about the survey was one basic fact: No matter how you sliced it and diced it by gender, age, race, income, location, or anything else, more than two-thirds of the several thousand respondents believed that any law-abiding American adult had the ‘right’ to buy and own a gun.

              In other words, for all the talk about how the 2nd Amendment is used by the gun industry to protect itself from being reined in or dismantled altogether, guns represent a basic consumer item which deserves to be bought and sold, a view shared by a majority of Americans, gun owners or not.

              And by the way, while I’m on the subject, let’s dispel another myth right now, which is the myth about the power and influence of the NRA as a lobbying organization, which happens to be a bit of braggadocio promoted by the NRA which happens not to be true.

              In 2020, the average Congressional officeholder spent $1.8 million to win a House race. If the race were a toss-up the cost would go as high as $2 million or maybe even more.

              I did a study of how much the NRA gave to the House members who danced to its tune, and if the NRA didn’t exist and didn’t give a dime to any of the House members who vote for gun ‘rights,’ the whole, big deficit for the average campaign of a pro-gun House member would be less than 5 percent. Big, goddamn deal.

              I live in a state – Massachusetts – which is considered one of the most anti-gun states. We have a very tough gun-control law, and the State House is about to approve an amendment to the law which will make it even tougher still.

              It’s  estimated that less than 15% of my state’s households contain a legal gun (not that we have any idea how many illegal guns are floating around my state or anywhere else, btw.)

              I lived in South Carolina in the 1970’as and everyone in my neighborhood owned a gun. Missus Beckham who lived across the street knew that her late husband owned a bunch if guns, but she wasn’t sure if they were in the basement or the attic but “they’s around somewhere” was how she explained it to me.

              The NRA could go out of business tomorrow, although the annual meeting is set for May 16 – 19 in Dallas, and I don’t think a single member of America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ would go rushing into the local gun shop to sell off their guns.

              No, I take that back. He’ll plop a couple of old shotguns on the counter and ask for a ‘fair price’ if the wife needs a new clothing dryer or his truck needs a new set of wheels.

              Know what will happen when he plows a couple of driveways next month and has some cash in his pocket that the old lady doesn’t know anything about? He’ll go right back into the gun shop and buy another gun.

              Because that’s what people do who like guns. They own guns, okay?

Want To Write a Gun Book? First Learn Something About Guns.

February 15, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , 4 Comments

              I think it’s entirely appropriate that my review of a new book about guns appears the day after Kansas City celebrated its second, consecutive Super Bowl win by hosting a shooting which killed one person and put 21 others in the hospital with varying degrees of injury.

              The book I am reviewing is Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns, which is basically a review of the political and media debates that have occurred every time the government and/or the courts focused on the legal environment which exists to regulate guns.

              I’m not sure how much time, energy or interest the author has spent in or around gun owners, but what I find both interesting and somewhat depressing is how someone can write a book about guns and get so much completely wrong.

              On his website, Erdozain claims to be “strongly committed to bringing history to bear on contemporary debates.” That’s fine, except that this commitment only works when you understand the history that you want to bring to bear, and this book falls far short of that mark.

              For example, the author refers approvingly to a media notice that Ronald Reagan’s tenure was “one of the darkest hours for the cause of gun control in America.” It was? What gun-control law was either weakened or abolished under Reagan? In fact, it was during Reagan’s tenure that the political surge which resulted in the 1993 passage of the Brady Act first appeared.

              And this misstatement about Reagan brings me to what I consider the most flagrant omission of this entire book, namely the absolute and complete absence of any mention about the growth of a national, gun-control lobby at all.

              From this book, you would think that the only people wandering around D.C. and various state legislatures are representatives and members of the NRA. How do you write a book about the so-called ‘gun culture’ and ignore groups like Everytown/MOMS, the Giffords Law Center and the Brady campaign?  None of these organizations existed when the National Firearms Act was passed in 1934, which exempted handguns from the strict licensing that was imposed on full-auto guns. Nor did these groups exist when Congress passed the 1968 law which basically established the current regulatory system over guns which exists today.

              If you have any interest in the legal history which created the wording of the 2nd Amendment, or the legal history of statutes which have infused many state legal systems which codify and protect a citizen’s ‘right’ not to back down, then parts of this book provide an interesting read.

              But what does any of that have to do with shootings which kill and injure as many as 300 Americans every day? Think that those three schmucks who started blasting away yesterday during the Super Bowl parade knew or cared anything about how or why the GOP changed its stance on gun regulations after Richard Nixon gave Elvis a badge in 1970 so that the country singer could walk around with a gun?

              The picture above happens to be the most requested image from the National Archives. Know why? Because most of the people who own guns in this country own them for the exact same reason that Elvis Presley was a gun nut, namely, they like guns.

              People like to smoke. People like to drink. People like to eat all kinds of fattening foods. We all behave in ways that we shouldn’t behave because those behaviors will hurt someone else.

              Not only doesn’t Erdozain seem to understand this, but he also seems to believe that he can say whatever he wants to say about the 2nd Amendment and gun laws in general without acknowledging or even considering whether these laws have any real value at all.

              Example: His comment (p.171) about the Heller decision in 2008: “But the court struck down a law designed to curtail some of that [gun] violence with a higher truth that turns out to be a tissue of errors.”

              The D.C. law that was rescinded by the Heller decision denied D.C. residents access to handguns. Does Erdozain bother to mention that the law didn’t work and that D.C., both then and now, had and has one of the highest rates of gun violence of any city in the United States? Last year the city recorded 40 homicides per 100,000 residents, which puts our nation’s capital city somewhere around twice as much violence as Honduras or Belize.

              Erdozain can get away with authoring a book about a subject of which he is thoroughly ignorant because the people who follow him when he spiels on CNN and other Fake News outlets are no more versant about guns than he is.

              Which is the real reason why there is a stalemate between the sides in the gun debate because neither side has the faintest idea why there’s another side.

What Do We Really Know About Guns?

February 8, 2024

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              So, if you want to fill up some space on a news website with a headline that will get readers to at least pause for a second to look at that page (and the ads on that page) you can always run a story about guns – works every time.

              The latest is a new survey done by NBC which finds a ‘record number’ of American homes contain at least one gun, the percentage of such households now hitting 52% to be exact.

              Actually, it’s not a majority of all households, it’s a majority of households containing at least one voter and as you might suspect, gun-owning households containing Republic(an) voters outnumber Democrat(ic) gun-owning households by two to one.

              This poll result, which the lead pollster described as ‘stunning,’ represents a very serious problem for two reasons, okay?

              Reason Number One: All those GOP-voting/toting gun owners are probably also MAGA supporters, and we know what that means.

              Reason Number Two: The more guns floating around out there, the more shootings and gun violence we have, particularly in those sanctuary cities and states which actually impose some kind of laws or regulations on how people should behave with guns, but the goddamn liberals want to pass more laws on everything – so what else is new?

              Meanwhile, for all the talk about how more guns equals more crime and gun violence, there has never been one, single study which attempts to figure out how many crimes are committed by people who have legal access to the gun that is used in any particular crime. Not one.

              But we know for a fact that every time a gun is sold to a law-abiding person who can pass a background check, that this transaction will ultimately result in some kind of crime or violence involving the use of that gun.

              Did it ever occur to the geniuses who create and run such surveys that a majority of the guns which are sitting in those Republic(an) homes are the types of guns which are never (read: never) used to commit gun violence at all?

              I own a Browning, semi-automatic hunting rifle in 7mm magnum which I used when I went hunting antelope in West Texas many years ago and missed a 300-yard shot by about 4 feet. There must be 100,000 such guns floating around, maybe 200,000.

              I also own a bolt-action Remington Model 700 rifle in .270 Winchester, a gun which has sold in multimillion numbers over the past 40 or 50 years.

              Know how many of these guns have been used for criminal assaults or stickups since they were first made and sold? Try none and you’ll be close, okay?

              Don’t get me wrong. We have a serious public health problem in this country because we are the only country in the entire world which gives law-abiding adults access to guns which are designed for one purpose only, which is to end human life.

              Think that Glock has ever designed, manufactured, or sold a ‘sporting’ gun? Think that the Sig pistol currently issued to our troops is carried out to the woods during hunting season to plunk Bambi in the rear end?

              So, what does this NBC survey really do to help us understand our terribly high gun violence numbers or how we should attempt to bring those numbers down? To quote Grandpa, ‘vishstugidach’ (read: not a goddamn thing.)

              For all the blabber in Gun-control Nation about how they would like to find ‘common ground’ with the other side, maybe they would start off by trying to learn something, anything about the meaning of the word ‘guns.’

              And by the way, for all the worrisome talk about the big spike of gun sales during the Pandemic and the consequent increase in gun violence, guess what? The sale of handguns, which is the type of gun used in gun assaults, is right back down to slightly lower than where it was before the Pandemic, according to the current report on background checks published by the FBI.

              Don’t believe me? You can download the data right here and then compare background checks for handguns from January 2020 to January of this year.

              Believe it or not, I really wish I hadn’t spent the majority of the 1,978 stories I have posted on my blog telling my friends in Gun-control Nation that they often don’t know what they are talking about.

              But I continue to be shocked about the amount of disinformation which floats through an educated population that would never accept such unvarnished nonsense if they were making a decision about something which would really make a difference in the way they live their lives.

              The problem which continues to bedevil this country when it comes to figuring what to do about the 100,000+ human beings who are killed or injured every year by the misuse of guns is that the victims of this scourge and the organized groups which lament the problem belong to two, very different and basically disconnected groups.

              More on this issue over the next couple of days.

A Mass Shooter Isn’t the Only Guilty One.

February 7, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 6 Comments

              This week a major case involving gun violence was decided in Pontiac, MI where back in 2021, a 15-tear old high school student walked through the school firing a semi-automatic pistol and proceeded to kill four students along with wounding seven other adults and kids.

              The jury returned a guilty verdict of involuntary manslaughter against the shooter’s mother, and the father will go on trial for the same charges next month. In Michigan, the verdict could bring a sentence of 15 years for each of the four counts. Involuntary manslaughter is defined as helping someone else commit a murder without necessarily intending to be involved in a fatal assault.

              Several days before the shooting, the parents bought a semi-auto pistol for their son as a gift, even though the kid was obviously not yet of age when he could purchase or own a gun, never mind have unsupervised access with it or take it into a school.

              The morning of the shooting, the parents met at the school with a guidance counselor, who had observed their son drawing a picture of a gun and also reported that the kid seemed uninterested in school affairs and was generally doing poorly in classroom work.

              After refusing to take their son Ethan out of school that day, the parents left and went their separate ways. Their son remained in the building but, and this is an important but, none of the school authorities considered it important to search the kid’s bookbag where he had stashed the gun.

              In other words, every adult who had some degree of responsibility for figuring out what to do about an obviously disturbed kid who was creating fantasies about gun violence which then became a reality did what they should have done, which was an immediate and through intervention, including a complete physical shakedown to determine the status of the gun.

              Which brings me to my first question: How come the parents are being charged with doing nothing to prevent this senseless tragedy but evidently the school personnel are being left off the hook?

              Second question: How come the parents weren’t also charged with violating the state’s safe gun storage law?

              The second question can immediately be answered, namely, that the Michigan law requiring guns in the home to be locked or locked away wasn’t passed until 2023.

              On the other hand, when the parents when into a gun shop and purchased the Sig pistol for their kid, one of them had to fill out the 4473 background check form and the FBI would then have run a background check, found nothing which could have delayed or denied the sale, and a couple of days later the kid uses the gun to do what the gun was designed to do.

              This case is being bandied all over Gun-control Nation as a perfect example of why every state should pass a safe storage gun law which currently exist in comprehensive fashion in 11 states with similar but less-comprehensive laws found in 16 other states.

              The problem with these safe storage laws, however, is that such statutes have never been studied to determine whether these laws make any difference in gun violence events at all. The studies which exist only look at whether gun owners are storing their guns more safely after they receive counseling on the risks of unsecured guns, and such studies find mixed results at best.

              Meanwhile, when it comes to altering risky behavior not just about guns but about anything else – smoking, drinking, speeding – so what else is new? If human beings could be taught how to avoid risk, just about every Emergency Room facility in the country would be shut down. Walk through an ER on a hot Summer day and see how many adults, never mind kids, are sitting there with sunburned skin, okay?

              I’ve said it again, and again, and again, and again. The reason that Ethan Crumbley killed four students in his high school was the exact, same reason why we suffer more than 100,000 fatal and non-fatal injuries every year because someone picks up a loaded gun, points it at someone else and – bang!

              It’s the gun which should be on trial, not just some kid whose schmucky parents thought that a Sig pistol would be a nice gift for him.

How Safe Is Safe Storage?

February 2, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 7 Comments

              Now that the White House has decided that gun control is an issue which might actually sway some votes in November from people who are sick and tired of the endless mass shootings which keep occurring on a regular basis, rather than wait around for Congress to act on a gun-control bill which they never will, the President is using his ability to deal with the problem through the issuance of Executive Orders which often have the appearance of being laws when in fact they are just things he would like the Federal agencies to do.

              The latest Executive Order related to guns came out last year and one of the issues addressed in the Order focused on safe storage of guns: “the Secretary of Defense; the Attorney General; the Secretary of Homeland Security; the Secretary of Health and Human Services, including through the Surgeon General of the United States; the Secretary of Education; and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs shall expand existing Federal campaigns and other efforts to promote safe storage of firearms.”

              Yesterday, the White House issued a statement pushing the safe storage strategy further, by calling on the Department of Justice to publish a guide in safe storage and for the Department of Education to encourage discussions about this issue among parents and communities and “encourage more people to take preventive action by safely storing firearms.”

              Everyone on both sides of the gun debate loves safe storage because it’s not very often that anyone would object to keeping a loaded, lethal gun away from the hands of anyone who might be disposed to doing something stupid with the weapon, young kids and doddy old Grandpa are perfect examples of individuals who shouldn’t be allowed to just reach out and pick up a gun.

              I happen to live in the state – Massachusetts – which has the strongest safe storage law of all 50 states. The law says that every, single gun in the home must either be locked so it cannot be fired or locked away so that nobody other than an authorized user (someone with a gun license) can touch the gun.

              The Massachusetts law was passed in 1999 and took effect the following year. In 2001, the rate of gun deaths in Massachusetts was 3.03. In 2021 the rate was 3.54.  That’s only an increase in mortality from gun injuries of 17% since safe storage went into effect. Oh well, oh well, oh well.

              The truth is there has never been one, single study which shows that safe storage has any effect on gun violence at all. Not one. But every medical, public health, gun-control advocacy group and for that matter, all the pro-gun groups think it’s a good idea. After all, it sounds like it should work, right?

              The studies on safe storage seem to indicate that the strategy works if it is defined as whether or not gun owners remember to lock up or lock away their guns after being told that safe storage is something they should do.

              Do any of these studies compare injury rates from guns before and after the gun owners become more diligent in terms of securing their guns? Nope. Not one.

              I had a guy who walked into my gun shop one day and asked if I wanted to buy six guns. This stash was every gun he had in his house and he told me that he decided to get the guns out of the house because his two children were getting to the ages where he was afraid they would fool around with the guns when he wasn’t home, and even if he locked them away the kids would figure out how to get their hands on the guns.

              I bought all the guns from this guy and as I was counting out the cash he smiled and said, “That’s great. Now I have some extra dough and when my kids are grown and move out on their own, I’ll go to a gun shop and buy some new guns.”

              This guy understood something about guns that nobody in the Biden Administration seems to understand, nor does any of our vaunted public health or other gun violence experts or advocates seem to understand.

              There’s only one way to make sure that someone in your home won’t end up losing a leg or losing a life to the accidental or intentional discharge of a gun.

              Cut the bullshit and get rid of the goddamn guns, okay?