Nancy Lanza Firearms Purchases Show She Was Ideal Gun Industry Customer

[BeyondGeography]

Like the Republican Party, the gun industry is feeling the effects of white male dependency:

Nancy Lanza, the mother of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza, was in many ways an ideal customer for the U.S. gun industry. A divorced mother of two with plenty of disposable income, Lanza, 52, collected guns for home security and for target shooting, according to friends and relatives. Her personal arsenal included a Bushmaster .223, a lightweight military-style rifle, and several high-capacity semi-automatic handguns.

...Military-style weapons like the Bushmaster, an AR-15 assault rifle once mostly limited to armed forces personnel and law enforcement, have spread far and wide in recent decades as a result of aggressive marketing by a gun industry fighting to maintain profitability in the face of a long-term decline in sales to a shrinking population of hunters.

Women have emerged as an important sales demographic for such weapons in the past decade, said Tom Diaz, a senior analyst with the Violence Policy Center in Washington.

...A 2011 report by Freedom Group, a privately held company that owns Bushmaster, the top-selling military-style rifles, noted that sales to women were a "significant" source of growth.

...A serious clampdown on military-style semiautomatics and high-capacity pistols would hit gun manufacturers hard, according to industry experts. A 2008 article by the firearms trade magazine Shooting Line described gun manufacturers as "hanging onto a single category."

"If you're heavily dependent on hunting, you are hurting," the article noted.

High-capacity pistols and military-style semiautomatic rifles, however, were on back order for many gun retailers due to “incessant consumer demand,” Shooting Line said.

...Overall gun ownership rates have fallen sharply in recent decades, according to some researchers. In 1980, just over half of all American households reported owning a firearm. In 2010, just one in three American homes said they kept a gun on the premises, according to a survey by the Violence Policy Center.

“The challenge to the gun industry is this: they have completely saturated their typical customer, the white male 40 or above, so they are trying to sell that guy his third, fourth, fifth, sixth or even seventh gun," said Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

To stoke sales, the gun industry aggressively markets military-style weapons to the consumer market, using catalogs, websites and advertisements in magazines that evoke patriotic themes or stoke fears of violent crime, economic collapse and civil unrest.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/17/nancy-lanza-firearms-purchases_n_2318599.html?utm_hp_ref=crime

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. Actually it tells us little to nothing at this point

The VPC bubba is pushing his points but Lanza is not the poster child for what he is saying.

7 guns. 2 pistols, 2 shotguns, 2 historical rifles, one AR. There is no pattern. 3 of them are old/unpopular calibers. As somewhat of an expert in this, it sounds like most of them are detritus from the divorce.

Yes sales to women and other non traditional gun owners are growing. S&W had its Lady Smith series. Lighter weapons and grips for smaller hands. Any industry is going to reach out to untapped markets. They are having some success.

Much is being made about her having an AR, but shouldn't be. It is the most popular center fire rifle being sold today in the US by far for a number of good reasons. It is also light enough for a woman to handle easily and readily modifiable to get it to fit and shoot well for many different shooters.

I am curious as to what kind of shooting she liked to do. Nothing on that yet. Curious if it involved clay target shooting with the shotguns. Not sure if that data will ever come out.

[BeyondGeography]

2. You totally ignore the decline of hunting and the number of gun owners in general

They are "reaching out to untapped markets" because they have nowhere else to go. I'm sure that's part of the reason why big money is leaving the sector; the business model is tied into high degrees of political risk.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

4. The stats are fuzzy on ownership

since it is not tracked and the source is self identification in polls. Gallup disagrees with the numbers CNBC was pushing, as was discussed in a prior thread. Ownership numbers also do not consider different types of gun owners, which is critical. A take on the different kinds of gun owners: http://www.democraticunderground.com/117293860 A

Hunting licenses are indeed falling in number. Its one of the few metrics that can be adequately tracked and relied on.

[BeyondGeography]

5. Seems Gallup is always the outlier on the conservative side, doesn't it?

I think Cereberus' decision to dump the sector confirms a lot of what this article says. If the future looked stable and lucrative, they'd hang in there.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

6. Its not really that clear

I would accept that there somewhere around half the homes in the US have guns in them. The ratio would vary tremendously on locale. Of more interest and relevance is the homes with active shooters which I would put at 30% or less, again depending on area. That is not scientific, but is my expereince.

I will watch to see what happens. They bought many parts of it cheap, but it is a low margin business and no one will buy a loser. Most of the profits are in government contracts, which this will not effect.

[Enrique]

3. I wonder how many guns Sarah Palin has sold to women?

I wonder if she got a cut?