Texas gun dealer Michael Cargill was elated at President Trump’s re-election because it meant that the flurry of firearms restrictions ordered by the Biden administration was over. The political win came at a cost: Gun sales are falling at his shop and across the industry because Americans, confident that White House restrictions are at bay, don’t feel an urgency to buy firearms. “There’s no demand,” said Cargill. “People are relaxed because there’s no fear of them losing their Second Amendment rights,” reports the Wall Street Journal. Background checks for gun sales fell 7.5% in December compared with last December, says the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), an industry trade group. With no available industrywide sales data, the analysis of background checks provides a rough measure of overall firearm sales. Share prices of the two publicly traded U.S. gun makers are down 20% from a year ago and industry executives are scrambling to come up with new products to juice sales.
The downturn appears to be a milder echo of the precipitous drop in sales after Trump’s election in 2016. Then, gun makers had ramped up production, anticipating that Hillary Clinton would win and spur a sales boom with her support for a new federal assault-weapons ban and other measures. Instead, demand collapsed, companies went belly up, and industry insiders called it the Trump Slump. This time, gun executives didn’t order a big buildup before the election, said the NSSF's Lawrence Keane. “The market is in a better position than it was,” said Keane. “While there may be some moderation in sales due to consumer belief that gun control is unlikely to pass…inventory levels are much better positioned now than they were in 2017.” The first Trump Slump ended at the onset of the pandemic as gun sales rose to record levels, driven by worries of rising crime, riots and looting. The pandemic gun rush included a surprising set of new gun owners: liberalso, women and minorities. Sales remained high during Biden’s tenure though gun-industry experts say it is difficult to disentangle the extraordinary pandemic-era factors from Biden’s push for stricter gun laws. Last year’s 15.2 million checks for gun sales was down from a peak of 21.1 million in 2020, but it was still above prepandemic levels. The election didn’t spur a surge in sales, with checks down 5.9 % in the last three months of the year. Industry leaders pointed to greater confidence in Trump’s re-election and the fact that gun-owners felt fully stocked after their pandemic buying spree.