Money is made selling guns and ammo without any concerns about the effects after sale. Buyers don’t need to know shit about handling weapons or to give a damn about safety. (Mind you, I know there are many decent, responsible gun owners. What the hell are they doing about the lunatics? Nothing.)
Sex, guns and ammo: inside the world’s largest gun industry trade fair
Guns are a big business, and the industry is raking in record sales and profits as people rush out to arm themselves following a series of mass shootings and out of fear of increased gun control legislation.
© Provided by Guardian News Mass shootings and gun sales.
While agents struggle to keep pace with demand, gun manufacturers are celebrating record sales. Smith & Wesson, America’s biggest gun company with a market value of $1.1bn, has raised its sales and profits targets and told investors that some distributors are beginning to run out of some of its most popular guns.
Smith & Wesson, which makes 90% of its money selling guns to consumers, expects annual revenues to total $650m to $660m in the year to the end of April, up from the $627m it made the previous year and 57% more than it made in 2012. Smith & Wesson is run by British chief executive James Debney.
The US’s other big-listed gun company Sturm, Ruger & Company has seen its shares rise 44% over the past year. Over the same period, the Dow Jones industrial average index of the nation’s biggest stocks has fallen by 10%.
The other big US player in guns is Remington Outdoor (formerly Freedom Group), which is owned by billionaire Stephen Feinberg’s private equity group Cerberus Capital Management. Remington, which manufactured the Bushmaster XM15-E2S semiautomatic rifle used in the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, made $939m in guns and ammunition sales in 2014, its latest year available. Cerebus had vowed to sell Freedom after the Sandy Hook tragedy but still owns the company and with it Bushmaster and DPMS/Panther, the biggest players in military-style assault rifles.
Jurgen Brauer, an economics professor who specialises in the gun industry, said: “Whenever there is even talk about firearms regulators there is almost immediately an unmistakable increase in sales. Even talk about such legislation translates into sales jumps.” …
“People are buying guns as part of the American dream of freedom and liberty,” said Brauer, who is based at the Hull College of Business at Augusta University. “And also, the hope and the dream of being able to use guns in self-defence.”
People very rarely get to live out that dream, with FBI data showing that gun owners are 78 times more likely to kill themselves than they are to carry out a “justifiable homicide”, which the agency describes as “the killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen”. …
The nation’s biggest firearms seller Walmart, which has guns for sale at about half of its 4,500 stores, refuses to provide gun sales data, but Freedom Group told investors that 9% of all its sales are “made to one customer, Walmart.” Ruttenbur reckons Walmart together with Dick’s Sporting Goods and Cabela’s account for 20% of the market.
Sex, guns and ammo: inside the world’s largest gun industry trade fair
Boycott Wal-Mart for a million reasons, including their bleeding employees while sitting pretty among the richest people in the entire world.