It’s not all that often that I carry a gun into a strip mall. Then again, this isn’t your ordinary suburban strip mall…
That’s because sitting next to Walgreens, in the same storefront that you’d expect to find a Hallmark or AT&T store, is a shooting range. No, the display cases aren’t filled with cell phones; they’re filled with handguns. And behind the (presumably bulletproof) glass are 16 lanes of climate-controlled shooting stations. The location isn’t the only thing that doesn’t fit stereotypes. For some, the customers may be just as surprising…There’s the lady in her early ’30s putting holes in the paper “bad guy” target 25 feet away — she’d never shot a gun before setting up in the lane next to me. Neither had the couple who rented a pistol to try for fun on a Wednesday evening…Not everyone there was new to firing a gun. The corporate cowboy in a polo shirt and khakis — stopping on his way back from a day at the office — was showing up for a competitive shooting match taking place that afternoon. Don’t even try shooting here on a weekend unless you’re ready to stand around. The wait for a lane runs about an hour during peak times. In fact, you won’t find the range empty even in the middle of the workday.“It’s like this every day,” said the range’s manager, looking tired. Clearly, business was booming a bit too much. “I mean, look around — it’s a Wednesday afternoon and this place is packed!” Around the country, the stories are pretty much the same.Yes, the gun world is changing dramatically in 2012. While Black Friday 2011 was relatively tame by most retailers’ standards, it was a banner sales day for guns. The FBI’s NICS database (which provides instant background checks for gun buyers) got nearly 130,000 hits on Black Friday, the most the database had ever received in a single day. Not much later, December set a new record for the most hits in a month. And for the full year, 2011 turned out to be a record year itself, registering more than 16.5 million hits to the NICS database, a 15% increase from 2010.Clearly, the trend of gun buying is still accelerating at a breakneck pace. But digging a bit deeper into the demographics of who’s buying provides even more interesting results…It turns out women are driving some of the biggest trends in gun ownership. According to a Gallup Poll from October, 23% of women personally own guns, up from just 13% in 2005. That’s a massive increase in ownership by a group that has traditionally shied away from firearms.We likely have the media to thank, in part, for the demographic shifts that are going on in the firearms business. Gun-centric TV shows such as Top Shot and Sons of Guns are giving publicity to gun ownership for recreation and protection. At the same time, guns are becoming a less politicized topic: While Republicans tend to be gun owners at a higher rate than Democrats, Democratic gun ownership has spiked in the last decade. Today, 40% of Democrat or left-leaning households own at least one firearm, the highest level in a decade.That’s not to say that politics aren’t still central to the gun business. With an election year well under way, the National Rifle Association is already actively railing against the Obama administration.
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