“We’re sort of firearms connoisseurs,” Whitney Condit said as she excitedly explored the latest handguns and semi-automatic assault rifles to hit the market at Shot Show, the world’s largest gun industry trade fair.
As she spoke, fellow enthusiasts spread out over the 2.25m square feet Sands Expo convention centre at the Venetian casino on Las Vegas’s strip. “We like to go out on range, we like to shoot. It’s a passion of ours.”
Condit and her fiance, Colin Gallagher, a former star of shooting reality TV show Top Shot, already own “around 200” guns, but are looking for the next few pieces to add to their collection. “We have rifles, shotguns, handguns. You name it, we pretty much have it,” said Condit, who runs a Firearms = LOVE Pinterest page.
The couple from Witchita, Kansas, are among more than 60,000 people who descended on Sin City this week for Shot Show, which has grown to become the fifth biggest convention held in Las Vegas, according to gun trade association the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF).
Steve Sanetti, president of the NSSF, paraphrased Winston Churchill as he opened the show at a gala dinner complete with a standup comedian. “During some pretty dark days of his own: We may experience some setbacks when a frightened and misled public acts without thinking. We may find that our path forward has been temporarily blocked. We may even have to endure some period of darkness before the facts and the truth about lawful, responsible firearms ownership again conquer the powerful forces set against us. The road ahead will be arduous and costly. But the people are never fooled for long. They, and we, will prevail.”
Inside the convention centre, uniformed military generals mingled with boy scout leaders touring more than 12 miles of exhibitions showing everything from the latest tactical assault rifles complete with laser guided sights to Lethal Lace, a garter that can double as a holster.
As all marketeers know, sex sells – and guns are no different. Manufacturers have hired a string of professional models to pose with their latest guns. Guns.com, the daily guns blog, collated pictures of its favourite women at the show “who do their very best to highlight and promote new products, equipment and, of course, guns”. Attendees who want to see more are invited to “the sexiest ammo show after party” at the Sapphire strip joint down the strip. Free entry with Shot Show pass.
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.
The gun rush has lead Wall Street analyst Brian Ruttenbur to call Barack Obama, who earlier this month announced a string of executive actions designed to tighten gun sales laws, “the best salesman for firearms”.
FBI background checks, which act as a proxy for gun sales, hit a record 23.1m in 2015 – more than two-and-half times as many as those processed a decade ago. In December alone – the month of the San Bernardino mass shooting in California, which left 14 people dead and 22 seriously injured, more than 3.3m requests were processed through the FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
Demand is so unprecedentedly high that Stephen Morris, an FBI assistant director, has warned of a “perfect storm” and cancelled all annual leave for 400 NICS staff in advance of Black Friday, when the system was overwhelmed with a single-day record of 185,345 background check requests.
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.
Shares in the company have more than doubled in the past year, with significant spikes following each mass shooting. Jan Mladek, SW’s general manager, declined to speak to the Guardian about gun control whilst touting the benefits of the firm’s MP15 assault-rifle model used to deadly effect in San Bernardino. He later called the show’s organisers to have Guardian reporters escorted from the showgrounds.
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”.
As well as gun manufacturers, retailers are also riding a wave. The number of gun-sellers has grown at almost five times as fast as the US population over the past five years, according to an analysis of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives data.
Neil Hogue, owner of the gun-accessories company Hogue Incorporated, said the industry was expecting sales to jump 25-40% this year. “Right now sales are really being driven by fear,” he said as he showed the Guardian around his Shot Show stand. “Fear of not being able to get those particular guns in the future. And fear of not being able to protect your family and protect your home.”
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.
Smaller retailers are happier to speak more freely about their success. Sporting a bright blue mohawk, Thomas Thompson – of Yuma Coin and Gun shop, in Arizona near the border with Mexico – said his gun sales have risen by more than 50% in the past six months.
“Because of all the laws they [politicians] are looking to pass we are selling guns quicker than anything,” he said. “Some people are afraid that you’re not going to be able to buy certain guns any more and some are ‘I got to have this’ as everyone is talking about it.”