Gun, ammo sales jump amid regulatory fears

After the shooting tragedy in December at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., President Barack Obama’s administration began work on a plan to curb gun violence. The plan, which has since been revamped into four separate measures after a failure to gain traction in Congress, hopes to achieve the objective of reduced violence, in part, by curbing the rights of gun and ammunition buyers.

Area gun enthusiasts have responded to the regulatory threat with their pocketbooks in a run on guns and ammunition.

Cory Loftis, co-owner of Eagle Jewelry & Pawn at 1400 W. Battlefield St., said customers aren’t discriminating. They are buying everything in stock.

“It has been pretty ridiculous,” Loftis said of store sales that have nearly quadrupled his projections since opening four months ago. “It’s not been hard to sell anything. It’s been hard to get a hold of the merchandise. That applies to everything – guns, ammo, magazines, even a lot of accessories have been hard to get.”

Ammunition manufacturer Fiocchi of America, which operates a plant in Ozark, is feeling it on the supplier side. Marketing Director David Shaw said demand for its ammo has been so great in recent months the company is no longer taking orders through the rest of 2013.

“It is due to the political situation, and you will find also that many firearms manufacturers are sold out,” said Shaw, who works out of Boulder, Colo.

He said U.S. sales for the Italian-based company are up more than 30 percent compared to the same period in 2012.

Nick Newman, owner of Cherokee Firearms at 1544 N. National Ave., said sales in the first two months of 2013 are up roughly 50 percent compared to last year, when the federally licensed seller of guns, knives and accessories recorded nearly $1 million in sales. While noting sales had been inching upward since relocating to National Avenue in 2009, he said there is no doubt the proposed restrictions on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips have impacted his store’s bottom line.

“Every facet of what we do is experiencing supply and demand problems – from guns to ammunition to magazines to reloading supplies, pretty much everything we carry,” Newman said. “If you are a manufacturer, you don’t want a year’s supply of your product sitting on the shelf. They tend to make things as they need them and kind of predict.”   

Loftis said he spends most of his time these days scrolling distributor websites for available merchandise. “It’s more about me putting an effort into getting inventory than putting effort into selling the inventory,” he said.

His main distributor – Winter Park, Fla.-based RSR Group Inc. – had four types of handguns available on March 6 out of the 1,660 it carries, Loftis said.

One week in February, he said Eagle Jewelry & Pawn received 75,000 rounds of 22-caliber ammunition – a smaller caliber that is not facing restrictions through current proposals – in 200 bulk boxes containing 375 rounds each. He put half of the inventory out an a Saturday morning and the other half out on the following Tuesday morning – each time, he sold out in less than three hours.

Loftis grew up at his family’s former pawnshop, Loftis Jewelry & Pawnbrokers. About three years ago, the family sold the business to a group of Tennessee  investors, and Cory Loftis took a position with the group helping to purchase and open new stores before breaking away last year to start his own shop.

Opening just before the 2012 election, he said he expected sales to take off, but all of his experience hadn’t prepared him for what happened. He had projected roughly $125,000 in sales through the first four months, but sales receipts November–February have tallied $463,000.

The gun and ammo dealers say the 2008 presidential election also caused a bump in sales, but this swing seems to outpace the action five years ago.

“It is an extraordinary situation,” Fiocchi’s Shaw said.

He said Fiocchi plans to purchase equipment to increase its manufacturing capabilities, but that won’t help this year. “We are at full production,” he said, declining to disclose product volumes.

Senate Democrats moved in late February to separate a comprehensive gun-control package into four separate bills due to bipartisan opposition to a ban on assault weapons, according to a Reuters report. As of March 6, the committee considering the bills had not voted on the measures that are designed to individually expand background checks, crackdown on illegal gun trafficking, increase school safety and ban military-style assault weapons.

Newman said many of his customers have their own theories about where gun control is heading, and those theories don’t necessarily square with reality. Even so, he thinks it is a shame that politicians, from either side of the political spectrum, would use a tragedy such as Sandy Hook to further a legislative agenda.

“The sad part is that these people were killed needlessly and murdered violently, and we are using that as an excuse to push some national agenda instead of trying to help these people,” Newman said. “There are not a lot of politicians who are heroes in my book.”[[In-content Ad]]