On Concerns Over Gun Control, Gun Sales Are UpDENVER — Sales of handguns, rifles and ammunition have surged in the last week, according to gun store owners around the nation who describe a wave of buyers concerned that an Obama administration will curtail their right to bear arms.
“He’s a gun-snatcher,” said Jim Pruett, owner of Jim Pruett’s Guns and Ammo in northwest Houston, which was packed with shoppers on Thursday.
“He wants to take our guns from us and create a socialist society policed by his own police force,” added Mr. Pruett, a former radio personality, of President-elect Barack Obama.
Mr. Pruett said that sales last Saturday, just before Election Day, ran about seven times higher than a typical good Saturday.
A spot check by reporters in four other states easily found Mr. Pruett’s comments echoed from both sides of the counter.
David Nelson, a co-owner of Montana Ordnance & Supply in Missoula, Mont., said his buyers were “awake and aware and see a dangerous trend.”
Federal law-enforcement officials cautioned that gun sales were extremely volatile. Nationally, rifle and handgun sales surged 17 percent, for example, in May, compared with May 2007, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation figures. That was before Mr. Obama had clinched the Democratic nomination. Sales then fell and were essentially flat by September compared with the year before, even as the campaign heated up, before rising 14 percent in October. November figures were not yet available.
What is clear is that every gun seller — not to mention every advocacy group for gun ownership that depends on dues-paying members — has an incentive to stoke the concern that can prompt a gun sale. Political uncertainty, gun dealers say, is great for business.
“Clinton was the best gun salesman the gun manufacturers ever had,” said Rick Gray, owner of the Accuracy Gun Shop in Las Vegas. “Obama’s going to be right up there with him.”
Sales at his shop doubled on Wednesday, Mr. Gray said, to more than 20 guns from three to 10 on a typical day.
The political battle over guns raged fiercely throughout the campaign in many states where gun ownership is common. On Monday, the day before the election, home-delivered copies of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette arrived in plastic bags that said, “Vote Freedom First” and “Defend Freedom — Defeat Obama.” The bags were paid for by the N.R.A., whose initials were printed on each one.
But some gun buyers and sellers never forgot, or forgave, Mr. Obama’s widely reported comment in April to a group in San Francisco that some Americans “cling to guns or religion” in times of adversity.
“It was an annoying comment, and it showed there’s a lot more to him,” said Mike Warner, 38, of Las Vegas, who was shopping for a gun there on Thursday.
Mr. Warner said he was an N.R.A. member and an owner of two guns but wanted at least one more.
Chris Casella, general manager of Federal Firearms Company in Oakdale, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, said he had been fielding about 30 calls a day from people interested in buying assault-type rifles, especially semiautomatic weapons, often with magazines that could hold lots of ammunition.
“A lot of people are buying them as an investment,” Mr. Casella said. “Better than gold.”
