Saturday, February 4, 2017

Unexpected Consequences Ride Again

I found the story about decreasing gun sales this week on the CNN Money page to be somewhat ironic and more than a little amusing. If you don’t follow such things, you may not have been aware that the last eight years have been a bull market for all things gun-related in the United States. Gun sales have been so strong that several manufacturers have expanded production and even some foreign firms have begun setting up U.S. divisions. Meanwhile, ammunition sales have been even more explosive, prompting some manufacturers to move into ammo production for the first time. Several explanations have been given for the increased sales, but the most common cause cited has been the persistent rumor that the Obama Administration was secretly planning to introduce legislation to confiscate all privately owned guns in the United States…

Why, exactly, such a rumor would have proven so difficult to dispense with has never been conclusively proven, and I think we can safely assume that if anyone could produce evidence of a deliberate smear campaign we would have heard about it by now. What we can establish is that these rumors let to panicked buying trends after the 2008 and 20012 elections, and rash of similar rumors about Secretary Clinton (and a widely-held belief that she would be elected last year) resulted in an even more intense buying frenzy last fall. But when a Democratic victory failed to appear, sales of guns and ammunition began drying up, and apparently several of the major weapons manufacturers are having to deal with significant surplus inventory which is showing no sign of ever being sold…

The irony, of course, is that many of the same people and organizations who are most opposed to gun control legislation were significant contributors to the Republican candidates in the last election – and in every previous election over the past fifty years. But while hunters, NRA members and people who participate in target shooting may make up the rank and file of the “gun lobby”, a significant amount of the money that supports the cause – and that goes into getting Republican candidates elected – comes from those same arms companies. And while they have undoubtedly succeeded in getting a candidate more sympathetic to their cause elected, they have also helped to undermine their own sales tactic: scaring people with the specter of gun confiscation…

Now, one could reasonably argue that a better-educated electorate would have known that the outgoing Administration had never made gun control (let alone gun confiscation) a priority issue. There was an attempt to renew the Assault Weapons ban passed twenty years earlier, but this was defeated by the Republican-controlled Congress and never had much of a chance. And while gun control is traditionally seen as a Democratic issue, any attempt to undercut, much less repeal, the Second Amendment would be political suicide for almost any politician seeking national office – and our last Administration certainly knew that. That the gun lobby was able to perpetuate this myth is a strong indication of just how ignorant large numbers of our citizens really are, but it also demonstrates that the companies in question did not follow up their strategy to its logical conclusion…

If the various companies that manufacture and sell firearms had really wanted to maximize their profits, they should have thrown all of their support behind a Democratic candidate that many of their customers (rightly or wrongly) believed was going to take all of their guns away. They could have counted on support from the people who make those air-tight containers that some folks have been using to bury cashes of weapons (you can’t confiscate what you can’t find, right?), and any number of publishers, filmmakers and lawyers who make money feeding the same scare stories to people too gullible to know better. But with a politician in office who will cheerfully sign off on new laws allowing personal ownership of whatever guns people want to buy, the demand for all of these products is already starting to dry up, and the entire industry may be in for a crisis in the new year…

Whether this means the companies and their allies are simply getting their comeuppance for foisting their politics off on the rest of the country depends on your point of view, but it does appear to have had consequences they did not anticipate…

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