8 ms·
There's also the issue - perhaps - of market saturation. How many guns does one need? My pro-gun friends typically seem to have 2-3 but shy away from any more t
by Simulacra 8y ago
There's also the issue - perhaps - of market saturation. How many guns does one need? My pro-gun friends typically seem to have 2-3 but shy away from any more than that.
- krapp 8y agoClearly we need to elect another Democratic president to spur the market on.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoBut preferably after two particular members of a certain branch of government croak and a republican president gets to replace them. I like my snake unstepped. People who live in certain states that shall not be named deserve their snake unstepped too.
- captainredbeard 8y agoRepealing the NFA & the Hughes amendment to FOPA would be great.
- i80and 8y agoAdding onto this, guns also last more or less indefinitely under normal usage and a proper care regimen (which, granted, not everybody follows).
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>How many guns does one need? Need or want? Like any other hobby your limit is your budget. There are guns that exist for no other reason than the lulz ("hundred dolla problem solva" I'm looking at you). Historically inclined individuals could spend a fortune just collecting variants of one specific niche of firearms from a particular nation and time period.
- turk73 8y agoThe Boomer aged guys seem to have a hoarding problem--I've seen photos of collections of 200 M1 Garands, 25-50 M1 Carbines, etc. Nobody cares that the cartouche on a stock is a little bit different. There's unhealthy obsession there. Not that I care. It's none of my business how someone spends their money.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- josefresco 8y ago> My pro-gun friends typically seem to have 2-3 From my experience, that's sort of low. I never thought my neighbors had so many guns, until I started spending time at the shooting range. A common site is a trunk packed to the gills with firearms. The "gun guys" buy them like the "sneaker guys" buy Nikes. They usually won't talk about it, unless you express interest or go shooting with them.
- omegaham 8y agoCan confirm, my father-in-law has more than 50. It's actually a really neat collection, but I wince at how much it had to cost and how much use he actually gets out of them.
- wl 8y agoSome people collect coins. Or cars. Others collect guns. You don't have to shoot a gun to appreciate it. My great grandfather's service revolver? It's a link to the past, not a range toy.
- dogismycopilot 8y agoThe average American gun owner has between 5 and 6 firearms. I just took the class.
- sparrish 8y agoAs a firearm enthusiast, the answer to "How many guys does one need?" is always "Just one more." <grin> It's a fun hobby that I can spend time with my kids. They also make great investments as a quality firearm holds it worth and often increases in value.
- mindcrime 8y agoYeah, take any hobby or sport or whatever that involves "gear" of some sort, and you'll get some variation of the old saw: "The correct number of $ITEM to own is n+1, where n is the number you own now." $ITEM can be "mountain bikes", "guitars", "road bikes", "motorcycles", "guns" or pretty much anything.
- paulddraper 8y agoYeah, I think it's fair to say that stamp collectors have tend to have more than "necessary" number of postage stamps.
- jfk13 8y agoAnd of course, the more of them we have around, the better the chances that one of them will somehow accidentally get misused one day. Oh, sorry; I'm sure you're entirely careful and responsible, all the time, just like every other firearms buyer. So there's clearly no problem with having an ever-increasing number of them around.
- sDlEzAtyoNAz 8y agoAnd the better chances that one will be used intentionally to protect a productive and decent member of society from a violent criminal.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoThat's certainly the fantasy.
- Blackthorn 8y agoAll the pro gun people I know, self included, have more than that. There are more guns than people in America, but not nearly everyone is a gun owner.
- ummwhat 8y agoiirc the number of guns in America is almost exactly equal to the population but the distribution is skewed a lot. About 2/3rds of Americans don't own a gun. The ones who do on average own 3, with a lot of them having 1 and a few of them having dozens.
- dfrage 8y agoYou're recalling a very old guess; an analysis since then https://web.archive.org/web/20190121202815/http://weaponsman.com/?p=33875 https://web.archive.org/web/20190121202815/http://weaponsman... puts the number anywhere from 412 to 660 million. The old estimates are bad, for example, 275 million new in to the market guns were counted by a system the BATFE introduced in 1999 for high volume manufacturers, importers and wholesalers, a total of 66 FFLs, that no academic had previously used in an estimate.
- howard941 8y agoThis sounds reasonable but the article indicates sales were good and gross profits high but what killed the company was aptly-named Cerberus' extraction of assets. It's a story we've seen before at Toys 'R Us, Sears, and others. A modern day Heracles is needed to deal with this beast.
- jcranmer 8y agoThere is an intriguing trend in the United States where, for the past several decades, the number of gun owners has gone down but the number of guns has gone up.
- brightball 8y agoDo you mean the percentage of owners? I can count on one hand the number of people I know who own a home but don't own a firearm.
- et2o 8y agoWhat state do you live?
- brightball 8y agoSouth Carolina.
- jcranmer 8y agoI did mean the percentage, but it does look like the absolute number of households owning guns has very slightly declined.
- Junk_Collector 8y agoI imagine it's difficult to get good numbers on ownership though as the cross section of people who would not disclose firearm ownership to the government or polling agency would also be likely to own a firearm. This is compounded by the fact that firearms last upwards of 100 years with minimal maintenance and there are healthy secondary and black markets for them.
- hcurtiss 8y agoNope. No guns at this here house. Not since the tragic boating accident of early 2019.
- claydavisss 8y agoThat isn't the case here. The products were of low quality. Firearms sales ebb and flow but there is no sign of a fundamental trough.
- ergothus 8y agoCompare to social media games like Farmville - most people might spend money they personally consider excessive, but that balances out with some other forms of entertainment. Meanwhile I've heard they had people spending upwards of $10k PER MONTH. Enough so that it wasn't "that one weirdo". So while the "average" owner might have 1-3 guns (in this case), and the average "fanatic" might have 5-10, you have enough obsessives to throw things off. (Carefully does not look at bookshelf with literal hundreds of RPGs)
- baud147258 8y agoCarefully does not look at Steam/GOG libraries with hundreds of games
- cr0sh 8y agoCarefully does not peek inside home shop to see tons of crap (aka - "vintage computers and robotics") purchased from hamfests... /sigh
- r00fus 8y agoAh, the "whale" model. Of course, what's to seperate a whale from an investor looking to goose the numbers to get his % higher?
- madengr 8y agoHell, I’m an order of magnitude higher, and am on the low end.
- TallGuyShort 8y agoLet's see, 3 for 3-gun matches, 1 more for PCC matches, 1 more for precision matches, a few extra if I don't compete in the same class for all of those, 1 the kids can shoot, 1 for my wife to carry, 1 for me to carry, bigger ones for the house and cabin, a few extras for the zombie apocalypse. No, there's plenty of demand for guns. Remington's just lost their former reputation.
- dba7dba 8y agoLol, you forgot to mention buying ones for family and friends, like Matt Carriker of offtheranch channel. I agree free market (with certain safeguards) is usually the best path for a society to sustain itself and prosper. But I feel private equity firms are definitely not good for a free market to sustain itself. And yet they and their lobbyists will insist free market is the best for our society, use that line to prevent any regulations over what they do.
- TallGuyShort 8y agoI don't see the market not sustaining itself, though. As a consumer, if I'm not satisfied with Remington, I just buy a Mossberg instead of an 870, or a Bergara instead of a 700, or literally anything but an XD. There's a lesson to be learned that if you open your investment to the public or get in bed with a private equity firm, you may now be pressured or forced into short-term thinking that isn't aligned with your long-term vision. But I don't see this as a failure of the market. In a free market, losers lose.
- omegaham 8y agoYep. The gun market is saturated right now. Literally everything that Remington makes is also made by half a dozen (or more) competing companies. If they make stupid decisions and build garbage, that's tough for them. We don't have any pity for auto manufacturers who make garbage and lose badly. Why would anyone have pity for gun manufacturers who do the same?
- icelancer 8y ago
- mikestew 8y agoAs will be clear in a moment, I'm hardly anti-gun but certainly not "pro-gun", and I count five in the gun safe. Shotgun, rifle, and a couple of handguns adds up quickly. Why so many for a "not pro-gun" guy? Shotgun/rifle/handgun fill different categories, and we have several handguns because I like Glocks, the Colt 1991 custom is purdy, and she likes her .357 short barrel.
- stcredzero 8y agoI'm a relatively new gun owner. I have 2 firearms, and by design I won't have any more for a very long time. I would have just the rifle, but it's often awkward or impossible to take classes and compete without a pistol. My entire system runs on the same caliber, and all of the magazines are interchangeable. It used to be that almost every American household had someone who was a competent shooter, an good cook, a competent musician, a decent craftsperson or repair person of some kind. Times have changed. From what I have seen, only having 1 gun is more common in the African American community and in some parts of rural America.
- pps43 8y agoIn poor neighborhoods communal guns are quite popular. They are stashed at locations that several people know about and have access to.
- ryanmarsh 8y agoAsk more pro-gun friends. It kind of becomes an addiction. Everyone I know has a 30 gun safe that's damn near full.
- kyrieeschaton 8y agoYeah, but a full 30 gun safe only has about 10 guns in it.
- Spooky23 8y agoThe problem with the "gun" issue is that people who aren't in the culture get exposed to movies, crime reporting and crazy people and just don't have a perspective on many/most of the people who are into guns. I grew up in NYC and moved to a country town when I was 10-11 years old. Guns were forbidden things that only cops and soldiers should have from our family's POV -- it was really awkward. But the sporting, enthusiast and security drivers of demand for firearms is real and legitimate, and folks in that culture are equally confused about the point of view. My parent's neighbor had a bunch of guns -- probably like 20. Some were antique, he had shotguns for deer, trap/skeet, birds, rifles for hunting and target shooting and cheap ammo guns for plinking and practice. Shooting sports were family activities that were positive things. I was into baseball, my neighbor was into shooting and archery. Unfortunately, the toxic politics around the issue encourage extreme positions and ultimate reduce real and nuanced issues into binary positions that encourage bad behavior. It doesn't help that extreme positions make money for different stakeholders.
- rspeele 8y agoDid you ask how many they had and get the answer, "oh, a few"?
- Simulacra 8y agoOh no, I asked to see them.
- pps43 8y ago> How many guns does one need? I saw several estimates that agree on average somewhere between 8 and 10. A couple of bolt action rifles for hunting, rimfire for plinking with kids, a pump-action shotgun stashed somewhere for home defense, a pistol to carry concealed, another pistol as backup, grandpa's revolver that is now a decoration, and three old rifles in various state of decay at the back of the safe that everyone forgot about - those are all very typical.
- some_random 8y agoNeed is just flat out the wrong word in the context of hobbies, it's like asking how many stamps or cars a collector needs. In the context of collecting, 2-3 guns is _crazy_ low.