Why It May Be Impossible to Measure the Impact of Stores Limiting Gun Sales
“Tracking a gun is harder than tracking a package — you know at a high level how
many firearms are manufactured, but you don’t know where they went from there.”
The end result is an industry that sees its numbers recorded only in broad strokes,
and fewer of those strokes in each step of the way from manufacturer to retailer to buyer to second owner.
At Dick’s Sporting Goods, revenue from hunting products, including rifles, constitute
10 percent or less of annual sales, according to another Wedbush report.
In an era when the toy industry can pinpoint the overall value of all dolls sold domestically each year
and the federal government tracks the number of trucks sold in any given month, data on gun sales is obscured by foggy reporting standards and loopholes.
For example, a 1996 provision known as the Dickey Amendment effectively barred the Centers for Disease Control from tapping taxpayer funds set aside for injury prevention
and control for research that could be used for gun control advocacy.
On Thursday, the company said that revenue from its firearms segment for the third quarter slumped 40.6 percent
from last year to $117.6 million, compared with a 13.4 percent upswing in its outdoor products division.
But whether those changes will actually have a meaningful effect on gun sales is difficult — if not impossible — to know.
