This week the Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade Show and Conference (SHOT Show) is meeting in Las Vegas. (See the Washington Post‘s story here.) This massive, glitzy show is sponsored by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, whose mission “is to promote, protect and preserve hunting and the shooting sports.”
The NSSF’s website is full of all sorts of handy information. In “Pull the Trigger – Tips for Today’s Gun Owners from the National Shooting Sports Foundation,” aficionados can learn to “clear a double feed”; how to retrofit older shotguns with chokes; and learn to load a “modern sporting rifle” (the modern sporting rifle is the AR-15 — a version of the M16 used by the United States and other militaries). And there’s an admiring piece on the Glock pistol: the Glock has a “fantastic, plastic pedigree,” is “exquisitely light,” and “easy to handle and easy to shoot well.” (No mention here of Glock’s most famous recent customer, Jared Loughner.)
But the NSSF is not a club or an association that just anyone can join: instead, it is, as its website notes, the “trade association for the firearms industry.” Guns are big business in the United States. Very big business. According to the Post, Steve Sanetti, president of the NSSF, calls it a “$28 billion a year industry.” The NSSF’s own online “news service,” not very fetchingly entitled “Bullet Points,” gleefully reports how well the gun industry has done recently:
While the U.S. economy was mired in recession, sales of firearms and ammunition climbed to record-high levels from late 2008 through early 2010.
This apparently recession-proof industry’s success is not an accident. The NSSF works hard to ensure that gun sales remain high, and urges retailers to “upsell” their customers — that is, to increase the value of each sales:
To help retailers maximize their sales and ensure a satisfied customer, NSSF’s Association of Firearms Retailers has released a new video that highlights through a couple of scenarios the importance and value of selling the customer, not just what they think they want, but what they really need.
What do customers “need”? More Glocks? More AR-15s? Perhaps some armor-piercing ammunition?
At SHOT Show in Las Vegas, thousands of gun-happy people will fondle sleek and seductive weapons. Many of these people will read the anti-gun control screeds distributed by the gun lobby, and will leave confirmed that there is some sort of nefarious plot to strip them of their rights and their guns.
What these happy people will not pay much attention to is that the gun manufacturers are far less interested in their civil or political rights — or even in “hunting or other shooting sports” — than they are in sales. The aim of these shows is to sell, sell, sell. Every attendee makes it easier for the NSSF to protect what really matters: profit. A small part of that profit is diverted to fuel a potent political machine: zealous gun owners; local, state, and federal legislators who know that opposing the powerful gun lobby can cost them their political careers; and a majority on the Supreme Court that does not care about the continuing carnage inflicted by the products the gun makers sell.
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