You have millions of extra sales.”įor gun dealers, the threat of increased regulation is frequently seen as a form of economic stimulus. “The great irony here is that the threat of regulation has the perverse effect of stimulating sales, and not just by a little,” said Philip Cook, a Duke University gun researcher and author of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know.
When President Barack Obama tried to pass sweeping gun control laws after the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, some dealers even sold out of ammunition. When the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, sales rose again. During the debate over the measure commonly called the Brady bill in the 1990s, gun purchases soared. The AK-47 buying frenzy presents yet another example of the paradoxical consequence of trying to limit gun sales: booming demand. “The gun community moved very, very quickly,” said Blaine Bunting, president of Atlantic Firearms. Some customers bought eight to 10 rifles for nearly $1,000 each or more, stockpiling them as investments. The frenzy was brought on, in part, by a suspicion among some gun owners that the Russia-Ukraine conflict was a back-door excuse to ban guns many Democrats don’t like. Labouring almost nonstop, workers at Atlantic Firearms in the state of Maryland had shipped hundreds of Russian-made AK-47s – a rifle prized by consumers and despots – as buyers wiped out gun dealers’ inventories around the country. T hirty-six hours after the Obama administration banned importation of the classic brand of assault rifles as part of sanctions against Russia, a Maryland dealer specialising in the weapon took stock of its inventory.
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