Why Are Gun Sales Booming?

A rush of icy air swooshes through Gunslinger’s show room every couple of minutes as customers file in and out.

“It’s insane,” owner Todd Sutherland said on a recent Monday.

“Business has more than doubled, if not tripled,” Sutherland said.

Other Tri-Cities gun and ammunition shop owners are echoing similar refrains, but the sales surge is only half the story. Sullivan County, Tenn., and Washington County, Va., both report that within the past two years, the number of handgun carry permits issued has doubled, if not tripled.

People are buying guns and ammo by the handful, not only locally, but across the nation, and reports on the buying surge tend to focus on the election of Barack Obama as the impetus.

Obama is expected to run the most anti-gun administration in U.S. history, based on his votes on gun legislation while a U.S. senator.

In Appalachia, where gun culture thrives and the buying boom appears monolithic, gun enthusiasts argue the national hoopla is missing the point: It isn’t that it’s happening – but what is behind it, and why.

“It’s a right of passage for a lot of people,” said Michael Campbell, a Virginia spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “No matter what, guns are a very emotional issue.”

Peter Hamm, spokesman for the gun control advocacy group the Brady Campaign, said the controversy is about much more than political parties.

“It’s not a Democrat vs. Republican issue,” Hamm said. “It’s a rural vs. urban issue. And the urban people don’t do a good enough job of saying ‘Look, we need some help, people are dying here.’ And the rural people don’t do a good enough job of saying, ‘Look, I live in the country where the closest police department is 40 miles away. If someone breaks in my house, I need to be able to protect my family.’ ”

Epic milestones

Interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the most contentious and impassioned debates of the past American century. Since a 1939 Supreme Court decision over a firearms violation said the Second Amendment must be interpreted with a view of rendering effective a militia, gun-rights and gun-control advocates have been arguing over whether the right to bear arms belongs to individuals or groups.

In the seven decades since that ruling, the collective argument has tended to prevail – but many on both sides maintain that the 1939 ruling was too ambiguous.

Then, in July, the U.S. Supreme Court tackled the Second Amendment again – and issued a landmark decision that clearly supports the individual’s right to bear arms, rather than only a right reserved for a militia.

Four months later, voters elected Obama, the Democratic candidate, as the nation’s 44th president.

Juxtaposed, those epic milestones illustrate the stark polarity that characterizes the debate over the Second Amendment.

“The Obama election represents the kind of worst-case scenario: somewhere between the end of the world as we know it and the apocalypse,” said Michael Banes, a national gun-rights advocate and founder of the National Shooting Sports Foundation Education Program.

Background checks

Federal law requires that firearms dealers check purchasers’ backgrounds before completing the sale. Those background checks provide one way to look at the number of buyers, even though the data doesn’t reflect when sales are denied.

In Tennessee, background checks are called Tennessee Instant Criminal Checks, or TICS, and they soared after the presidential election, said Kirstin Helms, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

“During the first 11 days in November for the last 11 years, we averaged around 11 [thousand] to 14,000 instant criminal background checks,” Helms said. “This year we’ve done 21,608. Some of those people were denied – but a certain percentage are denied every year.”

Gun carry laws differ slightly in Virginia and Tennessee, and state by state.

In Virginia, it’s legal to walk down the street with a gun holstered to your hip; the commonwealth is one of 11 “Gold Star” states as ranked by the gun-rights group OpenCarry.org. However, a permit is required to carry a concealed weapon and must be renewed every four years.

In Tennessee, a permit is required to carry a handgun, concealed or not, and must be renewed every five years.

The discrepancy explains in part why Tennessee’s permit numbers are far higher than its northern neighbor’s.

Records kept by the Washington County, Va., Circuit Court Clerk’s Office show that the number of carry permits more than doubled in 2007, the year of the Virginia Tech killings.

For several years, the average number of permits issued in Washington County, which has nearly 52,000 residents, hovered around 340, but that shot to more than 820 in 2007. So far this year, the county has issued 901 gun permits.

“I knew people around here were getting more handguns,” Washington County Sheriff Fred Newman said. “I encourage it, because the people who are buying them are law-abiding citizens.”

There was no drastic increase in Sullivan County, which ranks sixth among Tennessee’s 95 counties in the number of active handgun permits. Sullivan County has an estimated 2006 population of 153,239, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The number of gun permits in the county has climbed steadily, from 4,720 issued in 2006 to 5,042 in 2007. And so far this year, Sullivan County has issued 5,489 gun permits.

Keeping track

No one knows exactly how many guns exist in Virginia or Tennessee; in fact, there is no way of knowing exactly how many guns are in all of the United States.

Federal law prohibits the creation of a registration database of guns, and it’s a law that gun advocates ardently defend.

Tracking would be difficult anyway. Until the federal Gun Control Act was adopted in 1968, manufacturers were not even required to put a serial number on each gun. And with minimal upkeep, a firearm can last 100 years.

Even the NRA doesn’t keep state-by-state membership numbers, so it’s impossible to gauge the prevalence of guns or even gun owners in a single community or state. The NRA does boast 4 million members nationwide.

Yet surveys by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, part of the Harvard School of Public Health, put the number of privately owned guns at about 288 million in 2004, the most recent year for which the data is available. The center’s surveys also reveal that gun ownership is increasingly concentrated: 20 percent of gun owners had 65 percent of the nation’s guns.

Buying binge

Sutherland’s store, which typically stocks about 400 guns, sells an average of 125 firearms each month. Since the election, Sutherland has sold 288.

“I would say it has as much to do with the economy as it does the election. We all know that when the economy goes bad, crime goes up,” Sutherland said. “Coupled with the election, you’ve got a lot of people who were thinking about getting a handgun, toying with the idea, and they’re going ahead and doing it now because they don’t know if they’ll be able to later.”

Hamm, with the Brady Campaign, said there is no dispute about the surge in gun sales.

“We’re sure there has been a legitimate surge,” he said. “But we think the people who feel the need to run out and buy a particular gun are being overly concerned about gun laws in our country. When they [the laws] do change, they change very, very slowly.”

John Paul Blevins, owner of the GunRunners store in Blountville, Tenn., has been a private gun dealer in the region for 22 years and is somewhat of an encyclopedia of all things firearm. His store, like others, has seen a nearly threefold increase in business.

Blevins said that many of the guns selling the fastest – semi-automatic weapons included – are misunderstood.

Media reports call those in highest demand “military assault” rifles, he said, and it’s a term gun people hate because of its pejorative connotations.

Assault applies to all guns that shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger. One tug, one round. You don’t reload, you just tug again. That’s considered a semi-automatic weapon because it reloads a round automatically. But it does not shoot automatically.

A fully automatic weapon, also known as a machine gun, is not part of the debate, both sides agree. Heavily regulated, machine guns are capable of continued firing: When you pull the trigger, you don’t let go. The gun keeps firing. That’s why people use the word “spray” when talking about machine guns.

Blevins said the reason the term “military-style weapon” is used so often in popular culture is because some guns are styled to resemble military weapons that are illegal for civilian use. They’re pretty close, he said, but they don’t have the same capabilities.

“People fear that assault weapons and high-capacity magazines will be banned again, and this time it will be permanent,” Blevins said, referring to President Bill Clinton’s 1994 10-year ban on such weapons. “It’s Simple Economics 101. If you ban or curtail supply, the demand goes up with the price.

“Why would you want a gun like that?” Blevins asked rhetorically. “Well, why would you want to drive a Corvette instead of a Ford?”

Hamm faults the gun industry for romanticizing such weapons.

“Like any American company selling a product, the industry is telling them they need these weapons,” Hamm said. “I don’t blame them because it’s what they sell. It’s capitalism, it’s allowed.”

Gun bans

The Brady Campaign pushes for stiff regulations on a whole group of weapons it labels as military-style assault weapons, which includes semi-automatic weapons. On its Web site, the campaign cites statistics regarding crime since the 10-year ban expired in 2004; 165 people were killed as a result, the group says.

“It’s a small percentage,” Hamm said. “I mean, we lose 30,000 people to gun violence in this country each year.”

Hamm said part of the issue is, “We’ve never tried gun control in this country.

“We can’t resolve this issue because there isn’t enough data about gun laws to determine what is successful and what is not,” Hamm said. “We don’t in this society do a good enough job of explaining both points of view. Urban people belittle rural people’s point of view and rural people think urban people are out of touch.”

At the center of the gun-control debate is its impact on crime. Gun-control advocates say crime decreases when guns are restricted. Those for less gun control say with equal certitude that guns are a deterrent and the more there are, the more crime decreases.

“To sit here and tell you, ‘No, firearms don’t play a role in crime,’ well, they always do, no matter what,” Bristol Virginia police Sgt. Charles Robinette said. “But I’ve been an officer for 13 years, and I haven’t specifically noticed a difference as far as the ban or gun control is concerned. I haven’t ever seen a difference.”

Newman agrees.

“From a standpoint of gun control, if a person wants a gun, then he’s going to get it,” the sheriff said. “Nine times out of 10, it’s not a person who has a legal gun. It’s going to be someone who stole it, or got it from somewhere else.” Nationwide, gun crime is down, and save for a brief spike in 2005, has been since 1993. Still, FBI crime studies show that 66 percent of the 16,137 murders in 2004 were committed with firearms.

“What could really change the gun issue in America is that the Supreme Court made it clear that there is no secret conspiracy to take away guns,” Hamm said. “I think it’s great progress. Now we can talk about gun control that works.”

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