As household gun ownership has dropped dramatically since the early 1970s and America’s youth turn away from guns, the SHOT Show is proof of the gun industry’s embrace of increased lethality to shore up its fading market and declining sales.
The SHOT Show will bring together hundreds of vendors – including Glock, a manufacturer of pistols used in multiple mass shootings, which markets its handguns as “pocket rockets” – and tens of thousands of attendees, as lawmakers in Congress are expected to introduce legislation to ban high-capacity ammunition magazines like those used in last week’s mass shooting in Arizona. The show comes at a time that most of the major gun manufacturers are experiencing a significant decline in demand and falling sales.
Violence Policy Center
January 13, 2011
SHOT Show an Example of a Politically Powerful Industry Desperate to Hide Its Decline
[“Fading market and declining sales”? At first reading of this you might question what planet they are on since 2009 and 2010 were banner years in terms of gun sales.
If you read a little closer you might notice the sentence doesn’t even make sense. “SHOT Show is proof of the gun industry’s embrace of increased lethality”? Where did that come from? By reading further you discover that apparently the presence of Glock is the key to reaching that conclusion.
Reading VPC material is like listening to the rantings of the mentally ill. At first it sort of makes sense but as you look closer you find the most basic assumptions are wrong and the conclusions reached don’t even follow from the flawed assumptions.
Is anyone proposing legislation for mental health tests prior to posting on the Internet? Not that I think it should be done but I could see a case being made for that with the VPC as one of the prime examples.—Joe]
That’s just… wow. I didn’t get through the first fourth of the first sentence before I was looking for the missing tag that should have been the first element. I’m very curious how they (even mentally) reconcile the increased number of households and the increased number of guns in public hands with a drop in household gun ownership.
Wait, I think I have it! They were counting the number of houses that own guns! If that’s the case they may be correct.
Gotta admit they may be right though, it would be tough to keep up with the record sales of the past two years..decline is almost inevitable. I’ll try not to weep to much at SHOT next week.
If you dig deeper into their media release they have data showing gun sales through 2006 to support their statements. Of course this ignores the big sales boom in 2009 and 2010. It makes me wonder if the mental illness involved isn’t psychopathy rather than Schizophrenia.
Their claim of decreasing firearm ownership is based off the NORC survey, sections of which have now been funded by the Joyce Foundation. It shows a decrease in percentage of households according to a phone survey. The numbers, however, differ significantly from Gallup surveys of a comparable number. They also play fast and furious w/ the dates they choose to use for their claims.
http://daysofourtrailers.blogspot.com/2007/10/myth-of-decreasing-gun-owners.html
They’ve been proclaiming the end of the firearm industry for years and recently pronounced the market for tactical rifles to be dead. All because one company that tried to expand and had other issues went under.
They are truly delusional.
Boehner has already said that the magazine-limitation bills probably will never see the light of day. That amounts to “expected to introduce”?
Yearly firearm in the past 30 years have never been below 2.5 million firearms. That amounts to “household ownership of firearms has dropped dramatically”?
Firearm sales have been increasing steadily for the past four years, and possibly before, depending on what dataset you use. That amounts to “fading market and declining sales”?
Crap on a crutch… these people either live on an entirely different planet from us, are blatantly lying through their teeth, or are certifiably insane. Or all three. This quote definitely takes the cake…
That should read, “Yearly firearm sales in the past 30 years…”
If you got a call from a “pollster” asking you if you had a gun in your home would you answer honestly?
I suspect those numbers are less than accurate.
Damn, they keep linking to their previous “studies” and managed to get all the debunked hype, including the “50 caliber weapons can bring down an airliner on takeoff and landing” myth.
No civilian airliner has EVER been shot down with a 50 caliber rifle. The few aircraft that have been shot down with any sort of rifle have been helicopters that were hit in a critical area by a lucky shot popshot. And none of the rifles used were 50 BMG’s.
I wish that the crap put out by the VPC could at least be used for fertilizer.
Is what they are smoking legal?
The only pocket rocket gun that I would want is the gyrojet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet
Because, well, it’s pretty cool, and really quiet.
Chuck —
never forget, Ronaldus Magnus owned a Gyrojet. When he ran out of ammo years after the production shut down, he called the ex-president of the company years, asking if the guy knew anywhere Reagan could buy some ammo. Guy split his personal stash of a few dozen rounds with Reagan.
IIRC, Hoover, LaMay, and Goldwater also owned Gyrojets.
Cool history.