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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue it's still a little high, most of these companies are on the wane.

Guns in the US are near saturation from a market perspective and regulatory changes will eventually kick the floor out. Time to cash out... It's like when Phillip Morris bought Kraft and General Foods in the 80s to spin them off later when tobacco regulation came.

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Monthly gun sales have about tripled since 2000, and we had a lot of guns even back then: https://www.google.com/search?q=gun+sales+per+year&client=sa...

As to regulatory changes: support for a handgun ban is the lowest its been since Gallup started tracking the statistic in 1959: https://news.gallup.com/poll/150341/record-low-favor-handgun.... It's just 26% today, versus 60% in 1959.

Unlike with tobacco, there's no big scientific study or educational campaign that's going to drop. Guns are a well-ventilated issue.

Like with tobacco, big studies have been suppressed. Guns are far from a well-ventilated issue, they're just well-entrenched.

The Dickey amendment got clarified in 2018, and the first earmarks for research were for FY2020 - so, I'd say we wait with those proclamations a few more years.

What difference are those studies going to make? If Columbia University in the City of New York discovers you can use guns to kill people, are voters suddenly going to go "oh, well then!"

That's clearly not the kind of research that's going to be done.

Funding of gun studies means we can make arguments backed up by data instead of partisan bickering. Calls to arm teachers in classrooms or mandate trigger locks on guns have real world effects, and both sides think they're right about it. Funding for studies of specific actions and policies help us as a society make more informed decisions.

More info: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5993411/

You will find that many of us gun rights supporters don't care what data comes out. I don't support 2a because fewer than n people die per year from guns.

Facts often drive behavior and understanding.

Examples:

- Are there correlations between outcomes and specific brands, configurations, or other attributes of firearm?

- Are there correlations between sales at specific outlets and outcomes?

- Is age and/or experience correlated with negative outcomes?

The assumption is that studying this would negatively impact gun ownership. I don't think that's true. Consider that anti-gun rhetoric over the .50 Barrett rifle. You may find that it's really a collector's item that isn't associated with crime. I'm sure there are many examples similar to this, that are blocked by black and white opinion on the matter, fueled by mutual ignorance.

The Dickey Amendment didn't ban any studies or doing research, it banned the CDC from advocating gun control policies at a time when the administration was pushing it to use its authority/reputation to do so. It would be like me saying you can do all the research you want on teenage pregnancy and the like, but we're not funding your department to do political advocacy campaigns for abstinence. Stick to the science.

...and yet, where are these publicly funded studies on gun violence since? It's a ban in fact, if not a ban in law.

Here's a CDC-funded study on gun violence from 2013:

https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/1

You've been repeatedly and blatantly lied to by the media and politicians about the CDC being "banned" from researching gun violence. The ban was on the use of public funds to advocate for specific gun laws/policies, not on research into the subject itself.

And covid has made the mass shooting argument irrelevant. It's killed about ten times as many americans. The US can sustain 10k gun casualties a year without moving the politics at all.

Until it comes to the Capitol, I suppose.

Even smartphone demand slows down. And that's a device with daily utility with a 2-5 year life.

Seriously, I'm coming at this from a perspective of a country boy who went shooting 3-4 times a month as a teen, and earned a bounty for shooting pigeons on a farm. How much more demand can be filled for more guns the mostly sit around and gather dust? It's a market driven by ignorance and fear -- folks are treating these things as investments for a doomsday that will never come.

I'm not an anti-gun guy... I own two shotguns, a hunting rifle and a .22. What's the point of adding more? Pistols, AR-15 fetishization, etc aren't for me. What I have will probably be in great shape beyond my lifetime; if anything I might trade up if I got into skeet again.

Say you are right and no regulatory changes take place.... you're still going to have a cohort of old people who hit the gun hoarding profile start to die off and flood the secondary market with estate sales. My parents have a neighbor in the country that probably has >250 rifles, and there are way more people like that than the WW2/Korea generation that has mostly left us. What's the collector value of yet another AR-15 clone?

Population continues to grow, and there are many Americans who don't own guns who represent a big market. Many have purchased their first in the past year. And yes, lots of people like collecting a shooting a wide variety of guns. Most of then do it for reasons other than or in addition to prepping. The new firearms market is not going to die; the idea that it will is fudd nonsense.

The point is that manufacturers aren't really producing a wide variety of guns. I wouldn't be surprised if 3/4 of new guns in the country are black polymer-and-aluminum AR-15s or black polymer-framed tilting-barrel striker fired pistols.

There's a reason the tilting barrel polymer fired pistol is basically universal.

Gun ownership in the US has gone down over the past ~30-40 years, but the number of guns per capita has gone up, which indicates that fewer people are buying guns but that those who do are buying more guns than they used to.

Ownership estimates are based on survey data, not registration data. Gun owners are far, far less likely to be honest about ownership with some rando survey taker than they were 40 years ago.

The immigrant population particularly. There’s a lot of suppressed interest overseas that gets exercised upon arrival, whether visiting or immigrating.

> Even smartphone demand slows down. And that's a device with daily utility with a 2-5 year life.

How many people do you know who collect smartphones? Also, waaaaaay more smartphones are sold per year in the US than guns (it's roughly two orders of magnitude difference), so if that represents some kind of ceiling, then it's a very high one that guns are nowhere near.

Although I find firearms a bit scary in practice, I've been around enough gun nuts to get where they're coming from, and also been around to hear voices from different countries with different rules...and I agree that there is a "gun pollution" problem here that deserves a different framing from the form that has been around in the US my whole life.

If you have two guns, it's simple to keep them maintained, cleared and secured when not in use. If you have 250 guns, you are extremely likely to lose track of them. And when you lose track, accidents happen. That's nothing to do with crime or responsibility or freedoms or the design of the gun - it's there in the statistics that country by country, there are more accidential gun deaths when there are more guns, and bringing our market to saturation is not serving anyone.

There were between 2 to 5 million new gun owners (fbi and atf cant agree on much) in 2020. Legal gun ownership in the US is around 20+ million now.

Where do you get your ideas that the market isnt interested in guns? The issue with colt and Remington has been zero innovation and updating with the times. At bass pro shop, you could take a brand new Remington bolt action and need a sledge hammer to pull the bolt. A same class benelli needed barely a pinkie's worth of strength to do the same. Buttery smooth while the new Remingtons were already acting rusty.

The market has been going striker fire as well. I haven't noticed a big push from colt or rem before they shut down. Maybe they did, but it was too little too late.

Theres a lot more going on than just gUnS bAd. I'm happy for the hit on chemicalized tobacco. Makes it easier for the organic, natural market, mostly cigars and cigarillos. Let that marinate.

Guns in the US are near saturation from a market perspective

The statistics show record gun sales. More and more Americans are becoming firearms owners for the first time, and existing owners are expanding their collections.

What's interesting (to me) about this stat is that retail sales are up, meaning mostly newly manufactured firearms, at a time when we're seeing a "rolling over" of one generation's possessions to another - baby boomers are actively passing their collections on (or selling) to the next generations in private transactions. So there are a lot of firearms changing hands to new owners now (for the last and next 5 years) that are unseen by these retail stats. Guns are a very durable good.

at a time when we're seeing a "rolling over" of one generation's possessions to another - baby boomers are actively passing their collections on (or selling) to the next generations in private transactions. So there are a lot of firearms changing hands to new owners now (for the last and next 5 years) that are unseen by these retail stats. Guns are a very durable good.

It’s a matter of changing tastes as well. A Gen Z would cherish her mom’s old M1911A1 as a family heirloom but she’ll want a tricked-out Combat Master for her own use cases.

From my anecdotal observation this is true. Gun sales are also growing among demographics not typically associated with gun ownership (non-white, non-conservative.)

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