While most Americans mourn the mass shootings that happen more than once a day on average, America’s biggest manufacturers of guns are raking in higher and higher profits. The sheer numbers speak for themselves.
In 2013 alone — the latest available data for gun industry sales — America’s gun manufacturers made 10,847,792 firearms, according to the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. That accounted for annual sales of $13.5 billion, and a total profit of $1.5 billion. America’s gun and ammunition stores posted a combined $3.1 billion in annual sales, with a total profit of $478.4 million. And out of all the 10.8 million guns manufactured in America in 2013, 10.4 million stayed in the US, as only 4 percent of those firearms were exported.
According to Pew Research, America already has between 270 million and 310 million guns within its borders — nearly one gun for every man, woman, and child. The average gun owner owns 5 guns, though the top 3 percent of gun owners have roughly 25 guns apiece. Roughly 31 percent of American households own at least one gun.
These skyrocketing sales and profit numbers reflect the national mood. As mass shootings increase, so do gun sales. Columbine was just the beginning of a trend — according to FBI statistics, there were 160 deadly mass shootings between 2000 and 2013 (domestic violence and gang-related shootings weren’t included in that study). Those shootings killed 486 people, with 366 of those fatalities from 2006 to 2013. In that same time period, background checks for potential gun sales went from 9,138,123 in 1999 to 20,968,273 background checks in 2014.
“The gun business was very much accelerated based on what happened after the election and then the tragedy that happened at Sandy Hook,” said Ed Stack, CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods, an in interview with The Intercept‘s Lee Fang.
And behind closed doors, gun manufacturers are confiding to Wall Street that their market potential is bullish. And Wall Street is picking up on the trends and adjusting their investment strategies as mass shootings continue to occur with higher frequency.
“You can see after a tragedy, there’s also a lot of buying,” Smith & Wesson CFO Jeff Buchanan told a group of investors at a September conference.
In a 2011 call with gun manufacturer Sturm Ruger CEO Michael Fifer, financial analyst Jim Barrett asked if the “recent shooting incident in Tucson,” in which U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot at point-blank range, “has stirred gun owners and prospective gun owners to go visit the stores?”
As of the time of this writing, while Americans are mourning the lives lost in San Bernardino, stock prices for Sturm Ruger and Smith & Wesson are up, and rated as “bullish” by investors:
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