MAKE A KILLING
Tragedy triggers sales Execs crowed over massacre effect
THE DIRTY LITTLE secret behind mass shootings across the country is that the gun industry is cashing in on them. And the executives admit it. “The gun business was very much accelerated based on what happened after the (2012) election and then the tragedy that happened at Sandy Hook,” Ed Stack, the chief executive of Dick’s Sporting Goods, said in September 2014.
“You can see after a tragedy, there’s also a lot of buying,” Jeff Buchanan, the chief financial officer of Smith & Wesson, said two years ago.
The seemingly callous comments were made not to the public, but behind closed doors at various industry events, according to The Intercept website.
Citing investor transcripts for gun companies, ammunition manufacturers, and sporting goods stores, the website quoted executives making some of the most heartless remarks about profit.
Last year, Tommy Millner, the chief executive of Cabela’s, a retailer that sells guns, boasted at an investor conference in Nebraska that his company made a “conscious decision” to stock additional weapons merchandise before the 2012 election, hoping President Obama’s reelection would result in increased sales.
Not only was Obama reelected, but a gunman opened fire later that year at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and “the business went vertical.”
“I meant it just went crazy,” Millner said, according to a transcript of the event
Millner went on to describe the “tailwinds of profitability,” noting that Cabela’s “didn’t blink as others did to stop selling AR-15 platform guns.”
As a result, his company “got a lot of new customers.”
The AR-15 is a high-powered assault rifle based on the military’s M-16 model but without the full automatic capacity.
Adam Lanza used an AR-15 to slaughter 20 children and six adults in December 2012.
James Debney, Smith & Wesson’s chief executive, told investors in 2013 that “the tragedy in Newtown and the legislative landscape” resulted in sales that were “significantly up.”
“Fear and uncertainty that there might be increased gun control drove many new people to buy firearms for the first time,” Debney said, according to The Intercept’s transcripts
Gun control advocates quickly denounced the profit talk.
“Repugnant statements by gun industry executives saying mass shootings are good for business,” the Washington D.C.-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence said in a tweet.
Po Murray, chairwoman of the Newtown Action Alliance, a gun control advocacy group, said she always wondered what firearm executives talked about at their meetings and strategy sessions. Now she knows. “It’s what we expected,” Murray said. “We knew these conversations were going on, but to have a document that verifies it really is distressing.”
Murray’s group grew out of the Newtown massacre. She lived a block away from the home where Lanza, 20, began the shooting spree by gunning down his own mother, and said her kids used to trick-or-treat on his block.
So the thought of company executives profiting off of mass shooting is bad enough, she said. But learning that they openly discussed their windfalls is incomprehensible.
“It’s repulsive to think gun executives are actually celebrating the increase,” Murray said.
“There is significant carnage, but it appears that what is most important to them is industry profits. They should be as devas--
tated about these mass shootings as we are,” she said. “I don’t know how they sleep at night. If they only knew the toll of gun violence.”
Murray and other gun control advocates plan to remind them next week at an End Gun Violence vigil Wednesday at St. Marks Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.
There, organizers will commemorate the third anniversary of the Sandy Hook rampage, and the lives of more than 90,000 people killed by guns since then.
“We hope Americans wake up and start to realize we can’t continue on this path,” Murray said. “We feel the momentum is on our side. The tide is turning.”
That depends on whom you ask.
Gun love appears to be strong enough to support a television network devoted to nothing but firearms.
GunTV, which is set to launch in January, will bring the convenience of the Home Shopping Network to the process of purchasing deadly weapons, according to a report.
The station will be available nationally on yet-to-be-named cable and satellite providers.
When the network launches, programming will be limited to six hours a day, beginning at 1 a.m. But GunTV executives expect to be running 24 hours a day within a year.
The channel’s founders insist that GunTV is filling a market need by meeting the growing demand for guns while giving gun manufacturers a new way to advertise their latest models.
They said the new network will contain helpful information about gun safety and responsible gun ownership.
Executives quoted in the Intercept article did not respond to calls or emails from the Daily News requesting comment.
The industry was also bolstered by news that a record number of Black Friday shoppers sought to buy guns.
The FBI said it processed more than 185,000 background checks Friday, the same day a gunman killed three people, including a police officer, at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood site.