Get ‘em While You Can

 

 

 

 ” Gun sales are soaring in the wake of President Barack Obama’s reelection. Evidence for the beginning of what could be a second Obama gun boom are both anecdotally and empirically visible. 

To start with the anecdotal evidence, there’s no shortage of dealers and gun shop owners reporting a spike in sales.    

“We’re going from normally six to eight guns a day to 25,” Mel Bernstein, owner of Dragonman Arms in Colorado Springs, Colorado, told KOAA-TV.  “I stocked up, I got a stockpile of these AK-47s, we’re selling these like hot cakes. Luckily I had an idea of what was going on because it happened with Clinton.”

Bernstein is referring to the rise in gun sales before the passage of the Clinton-era Assault Weapons Ban, which placed restrictions on firearms with the following features: folding or telescoping stocks, magazine capacity, pistol grips, bayonet mounts, flash suppressors, among others. The ban, as most of us recall, expired in 2004.  

“Sales are up,” John Kielbasa, owner of Fernwood Firearms in Hankins, New York, told CNN.  “I had a guy waiting here first thing in the morning [after the election]. He came in, bought two AK-47s. It’s going to be good for me for business.”

What’s happening on the ground, so to speak, is also being reflected in the stock market.  Stock prices for the two publicly traded firearms manufacturers, Smith & Wesson and Ruger, continue to show strong returns, easily surpassing the return on the S&P 500 index, as seen courtesy of the Forbes chart below: “ 

 

 

 

Chart of stock prices for Ruger and Smith & Wesson. Dated Nov. 8, 2012.

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