The Day

Once-booming gun industry sees sales drop under Trump

- By LISA MARIE PANE

Webster, Texas — President Donald Trump promised to revive manufactur­ing in the United States, but there’s one once-burgeoning sector poised to shrink under his watch: the gun industry.

Fears of government limits on guns — some real, some perceived — led to a surge in demand during President Barack Obama’s tenure and manufactur­ers leapt to keep up. Over the decade ending in 2015, the number of U.S. companies licensed to make firearms jumped a whopping 362 percent. But sales are down and the bubble appears to be bursting with a staunch advocate for gun rights in the White House and Republican­s ruling Congress.

“The trends really almost since Election Day or election night have been that gun sales have slacked off,” said Robert Spitzer, political science department chairman at State University of New York at Cortland. “When you take away Barack Obama and you give the Republican­s control of both houses of Congress, which is extremely friendly to the gun lobby, then the political pressure subsides. And that surely is at least a key part of the explanatio­n for the drop-off in sales.”

The pendulum swing is not lost on employees of outfits such as Battle Rifle Co., a small enterprise tucked into a nondescrip­t strip mall outside Houston, with a storefront section featuring cases filled with handguns and walls lined with assault rifle-style long guns. The manufactur­ing floor and its eight employees, all veterans of the military or law enforcemen­t, occupy the back.

“President Obama was the best gun salesman the world has ever seen,” said production manager Karl Sorken, an Army veteran and self-described liberal who voted for Obama and notes the change for the industry under Trump is a topic of conversati­on in the shop.

“You might have people who were more inclined to buy because they were worried they might not be able to later. That’s going away for sure,” he said. “But by the same token, the shooting sports in this country are going to explode because they’re not going to be as worried or restricted about how they can shoot, where they can shoot.”

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