So Now the Problem Is That Guns Aren’t Cheap?

Once upon a time, the anti-gunners cooked up a term for inexpensive handguns. They called them “Saturday Night Specials,” a way to demonize the cheap firearms that allowed poorer Americans to afford a firearm they could use to defend themselves. They did everything they could to ban the guns, constantly vilifying the inexpensive options as some great scourge to America’s inner cities.

So, if prices are stable for guns, you’d think they’d be happy. After all, it means there aren’t cheap firearms running around anymore, other than a small number of manufacturers that most people know better than to buy in the first place.

It seems, though, if you thought that, you’d be wrong. In fact, The Trace has a whole thing about it.

By June 2018, John Kielbasa had concluded that the SIG Sauer products at his New York gun store, Fernwood Firearms, just wouldn’t sell. So he did what many business owners do with hard-to-move stock: He cut prices. When SIG caught wind of the price drop, it sent an email to Kielbasa reminding him that he had agreed not to advertise the company’s guns below a minimum price. If he didn’t raise the advertised prices, the email said, SIG would cut off his supply.

Kielbasa quickly complied, but he pressed the company for a solution by email. “I took a couple of the guns home put them in a pot and tried to cook them and eat them but it did not work,” he wrote in a message posted the same day on his store’s Facebook page. “[P]lease contact me on what I am going to do with the stock of Sigs that are not selling?”

Now, allow me to point out that this isn’t unusual. I’ve seen a lot of products over the years where the website advertising it tells you to add it to your cart to see the price. You can sell it below minimum pricing; you just can’t advertise it below the minimum. This isn’t unusual, and while I feel for Kielbasa, the reality is that The Trace wants to use this framing to suggest that something nefarious is going on.

It’s not.

But they don’t stop there.

According to a new report from the gun violence prevention group Guns Down America, Kielbasa’s experience is evidence of decades-long coordination between retailers and gun manufacturers to fix prices above what the market might otherwise support. Retailers — particularly those with the buying power to influence manufacturers — have steered the scheme to guarantee profits, the report alleges, leaving the American gun-buying public to pay the price. 

“The gun industry is artificially inflating prices, and blocking safety efforts,” said Hudson Munoz, Guns Down America’s executive director. “That screws gun owners, and it fills the war chest on which these companies depend to oppose public safety efforts.”

We’re touched that Guns Down America is so concerned about gun owners and how we’re supposedly getting screwed. Absolutely touched. In fact, I might just shed a single, solitary tear.

Of course, the rest of that sentence tells you exactly why they’re bothered. It’s money the gun manufacturers can use to defend gun rights, thus opposing gun control, which seeks to completely destroy the businesses themselves. In other words, they’re using some of the money they might to fight for their ability to continue existing.

Are we shocked by this?

Of course, the piece goes on to treat minimum advertised pricing, or MAP, as something villainous, but dozens of industries engage in it. In part, I suspect it helps retailers from being undercut by larger competition beyond a certain point. While the piece continues to reference Kielbasa’s experience and the fact that he shut his gun store down in 2022, the reality is that MAP is a common business thing, not something terrible or unique to the gun industry.

Interestingly, though, The Trace’s expert on MAP policy said that the report in question didn’t actually prove a damn thing. Sure, he said there was some “smoke” due to the report, but you’d expect that with The Trace. They wouldn’t quote someone who discredited the whole so-called report, now would they?

Look, I get that guns aren’t cheap, but when you consider all the regulatory headaches every company has to go through, then the distributors go through, then the stores themselves, there’s going to be some kind of cost involved, and that’s going to be passed on to the consumer. As prices from manufacturers tend to remain more or less stable, it’s unlikely that you’re going to see any evidence of them actually gouging anyone. That’s because they’re not.

But it’s still hilarious that guns were once demonized for being too cheap, and now they’re supposedly too expensive.

Then again, if the companies didn’t use their money to fight in the halls of legislatures for their right to exist, we all know Guns Down America wouldn’t say crap about the price other than, maybe, they were still too cheap.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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