Oliver Munday for BuzzFeed News
“In most sports,young athletes spend years honing skills
that they’ll never use when they’re older,” the cartoon
videobegins, panning over a dejected football
player, cheerleader, and lacrosse goalie. “But one sport provides a
gateway to a lifetime of enjoyment and expertise: shooting
sports.”
That’s from the homepage of the USA High School Clay Target
League, the independent, nonprofit provider of what it says is
America’s fastest-growing and safest high school sport: target
shooting.
This co-ed league, open to students in grades 6 through 12, has
grown rapidly in recent years, with 8,600 student athletes
participating at last count and more than 12,000 estimated to
participate next year, according to founder Jim Sable. With
after-school practice at gun clubs, shotguns for
equipment, and the promise of
new lifelong gun enthusiasts, the league also highlights one of the
great hopes of the American firearm industry, which is still
straightening itself out after a record-breaking sales frenzy in
2013.
Sporting goods retailer Cabela’s, which is a sponsor for the
league, mentioned it in September as a positive for sales, and
Sable says the sport has breathed new life into gun clubs in his
home state of Minnesota.
The gun business needs more young people to become its favorite
kind of customer: people who own and shoot guns not just for
self-defense or hunting or constitutional principles but for the
downright
funof it. After a decade of massive growth, investors expect
companies to keep sales at levels that once seemed like temporary
highs, and to do that, gun makers and retailers can’t just rely on
hunters buying a new rifle every decade and a box of ammo every
year.
The industry needs people to buy guns the way nerds buy gadgets
or fashionistas buy shoes. These are the kind of customers that
predictable, long-term growth is built on, even if it’s not the
reason sales of guns and ammo have periodically spiked over the
past 15 years.
Those spikes have largely been driven by fear — fear for one’s
safety, or fear that the government will tighten gun laws. There
was a surge in demand after Sept. 11, 2001, “as a direct result of
the terrorist acts,” Smith & Wesson
wrotein its 2005 annual report.
As Americans turned their attention to personal security, the
company went from manufacturing about 10,200 handguns a month
pre-9/11 to 28,000 a month a few years later.
More surges followed: in the wake of mass shootings; around the
2008 and 2012 presidential elections; and during the economic
downturn, helped by looser concealed carry laws. Demand hit an
all-time high in 2013 after a gunman slaughtered 26 people,
including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Connecticut, at the end of 2012 — gun buyers became so convinced
that a crackdown was approaching that the industry was hit by
“panic buying,” Ed Stack, the CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods, said on
a conference call last year.
Sales have since
settled— though at levels double
or triple what they were a decade ago — leaving retailers and
manufacturers to work their way through
an inventory glut. There may be
more sales spikes ahead, with a contentious election
cycleunderway and rising fears
of terrorist attacks.
But with pressure from investors to keep sales growing, even
from the already-elevated level after the boom decade, the industry
is searching for new ideas.
Courtesy USA High School Clay Target League
For companies unable to grow sales outside of the periodic
bursts of panic buying, results can be dire. Colt Defense, the
iconic gunmaker founded by Samuel Colt in the 1800s,
blamedits bankruptcy this summer
in parton “a commercial sales
bubble in 2013 driven by fears of increased future regulation.”
So how to appeal to an entirely new base of customers?
Executives have repeatedly brought up one idea in conference calls
and in interviews lately: Make guns more fun.
“The first-time gun buyer, especially today, may be purchasing
that first firearm for self-defense,” Mike Fifer, the CEO of Sturm
Ruger & Co. said on a call with analysts a year ago. “And some
of them will never get beyond that. They'll buy the gun with some
apprehension and reluctance and they either won't shoot it at all
or hope they never use it. And we're not going to win them over as
gun buyers.”
But among those first-time purchasers are people who will
“accidentally discover that it's really, really a lot of fun,” he
said. “And the minute that happens and then they start seeing what
guns their friends have, they got the bug and we got a customer for
life and new products are going to win them over.”
That dynamic has the industry focused on recreational shooters
over hunters, especially after the sales surge in 2013, which Stack
said “really brought shooters into the industry.” While there’s
overlap between the two groups, the recreational shooter is the one
“going to pistol ranges and shooting in leagues or going to gun
clubs and shooting skeet, trap, those kinds of things," he said.
They’re also more likely to be whizzing through bullets and buying
more guns for more purposes.
The industry is embracing “the beauty of the recreational
shooter,” Tommy Millner, the CEO of Cabela's, said at a September
conference, noting an increase of women and young people in
shooting sports. “The hunter shoots one bullet — that's not great
for business. The recreational shooter shoots boxes of bullets. And
clearly what we see both from our own friends and from our
customers is for a new shooter, a gun is like a potato chip: You're
not going to have just one.”
Millner continued: “So you get involved in trap shooting and
somebody says, 'Let's go skeet shooting.' Well, you need a
different gun to go skeet shooting. And if you're going to go
sporting clay shooting, well, you need another gun. And if you're a
female handgun target shooter, you may start with a revolver and
then your girlfriend has a pistol and you want to shoot that and
you like that and you go buy one. So it's been the case with male
participants for years, nobody just owns one. And those are really
good healthy dynamics for our whole industry, our competitors,
ourselves, and our suppliers.”
A young man tries out a Bushmaster BA50 displayed at the 2015
NRA Annual Convention.
Karen Bleier / AFP / Getty Images
The size of the commercial firearms, ammunition, and accessories
markets in the U.S., in aggregate, was estimated to be $14 billion
in 2013, according to an
annual reportfrom Remington
Outdoor, one of America’s biggest manufacturers of commercial
firearms and ammunition. Most manufacturers and retailers that
publicly disclose revenue report less than $1 billion a year from
guns and ammo, which is less than Lululemon’s yearly sales and a
quarter of what Old Navy pulls in domestically.
Vista Outdoor makes most of its $2 billion in annual sales from
shooting sports, a segment where ammo — like its Federal Premium
brand — is the top-selling item. It has also reported the rise of
the recreational shooter.
"A hunter might shoot a box of shells over two years, but a
recreational shooter might shoot hundreds of rounds in a single
weekend."
“A hunter might shoot a box of shells over two years, but a
recreational shooter might shoot hundreds of rounds in a single
weekend,” Vista CEO Mark DeYoung told
OutdoorLife
in February, acknowledging “a
big shift” from hunting to recreational ammo sales. “And that
consumer is also in the market for consumables — holsters, slings,
optics, and other gear — made by the brands in our portfolio.”
Ammo is nearly as lucrative a business as guns. Remington, which
owns brands like Bushmaster, Marlin, and Barnes Bullets,
brought in44% of its $939
million in sales last year from ammunition. (The private company,
owned by Cerberus Capital Management, was formerly known as Freedom
Group.) Ammo was also a more profitable business for the company,
with profit margins of 29% compared to 18% for firearms.
Remington’s Bushmaster brand is best known as a leading maker of
AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, which have surged in popularity
in the past 20 years by appealing to younger shooters and those
less interested in traditional hunting. The guns, known as modern
sporting rifles, are often referred to as “military-style assault
weapons,” a designation loathed by
enthusiastswho argue any militaristic
similarity is cosmetic and that they “function like other
semi-automatic civilian sporting firearms.”
A big draw of the AR-15-style rifle is how customizable it is,
which is a boon for manufacturers and retailers. A
New York Times
story about the riflesin 2013
quoted a range officer in North Carolina as saying: “You can take
the whole gun apart and replace any part you want to without
special tools, without knowing a whole lot. ... They are Legos for
guys.” In its latest annual filing, Remington said it’s “made
acquisitions that enable us to provide components and parts to
customize MSRs, allowing us to generate additional sales to
existing customers, with component systems and parts often yielding
higher margins than complete rifles.”
In August, Walmart, the country’s biggest seller of guns and
ammunition, said it would
stop selling modern sporting
riflesbased on lower consumer demand. In September, Cabela’s
CEO noted Walmart won’t sell anything “that looks remotely
tactical,” which is “a wonderful gift to us as the second largest
seller of firearms in the United States.”
Three variations of the AR-15 assault rifle displayed by the
California Department of Justice.
Rich Pedroncelli / AP
Jim Sable told BuzzFeed News he
came upwith the idea for the high school
shooting league in 2001, after watching the average age at his gun
club jump to the mid-fifties. He worked with the Minnesota
Department of Natural Resources on an informal survey of gun clubs
around the state and discovered 10% had gone out of business while
another 10% were “hanging on by a thread,” with members even older
than at his club.
"Why not go to the schools? That’s where the money is."
“A few people said, we ought to start inviting our children,
grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, and I said, 'Well, anything we
do will be good, but that all by itself is not going to be good
enough because we aren’t going to attract the kinds of numbers that
we need,'” said Sable, 77, who established the league as a
nonprofitin 2011 and emphasized
its focus on safety and sportsmanship.
“I always had a story in the back of my mind that I really
enjoyed — back in the 1930s and 1940s, there was a bank robber by
the name of Willie Sutton, and he had been arrested numerous times.
On the last occasion, the people from the FBI that arrested him
said, ‘Willie, why in the world do you keep robbing banks like
this?’ And he said, ‘That’s where the money is.’
“And so I thought the same philosophy works here:
Why not go to the schools? That’s where the money is.”
It was easier than anyone expected. The
league’s websitesays Sable met with his first
athletic director the same day the front page of the local
newspaper was dominated by the story of a young man who used the
service revolver of his retired police officer grandfather to
murder him — then went on a school shooting rampage.
Now, the league, which is accident-free, has expanded to
Wisconsin and North Dakota, and 18 other states have expressed
interest in starting their own chapters, Sable said. As Bloomberg
News
reportedin July, gun-control
advocates haven’t opposed trap shooting as a school sport. Sable
said students must obtain a state firearm safety certificate and
know they can't bring guns on to school property.
Francois Nel / Getty Images
The league may be growing, but hunting and household gun
ownership are both on the decline. Last year, a record
lowof 15.4% of adults lived in
households where they or their spouse were hunters, down from a
peak of 31.6% in 1977, according to the General Social Survey from
NORC, an independent research
organization at the University of Chicago. The survey also said
just under 35% of adults lived in a household with a firearm in
2014 and 2010, compared with about 50% in 1980.
"Fewer gun owners [are] owning more guns."
“While reliable gun ownership data is difficult to come by, we
can safely say that gun ownership is becoming increasingly
concentrated,” James Hardiman, an analyst at Wedbush Securities,
wrote in an Oct. 12 note recommending Smith & Wesson shares.
“Fewer gun owners [are] owning more guns, as guns are primarily
marketed to people who already own guns.”
A 2011
surveyof more than 10,000
handgun owners found that the average respondent had about seven
guns, with 90% responding that they owned more than one, according
to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group. Smith
& Wesson CEO James Debney cited the statistic on a 2014
conference call, noting “it just gives you some insight into the
collective mentality of people who own firearms.”
That’s not an unusual dynamic — Neiman Marcus recently
said thatits loyalty program
members with “reward status” account for a staggering 40% of its
annual revenue, spending 11 times more in a year than other
customers. Luxury carmakers like
Ferrarihave said most of their
U.S. sales are to repeat customers.
That collector mentality is reflected in how Sturm Ruger’s
business can turn on the bells and whistles of its new pistols,
rifles, and revolvers. New product introductions accounted for only
16% of its $542 million in firearm sales last year. In 2013, new
products made up 29% of its record $679 million in gun sales, and
in 2012, it was 38% of $485 million. Fifer, its CEO, noted last
year that gun enthusiasts are “always just looking for an excuse to
buy another gun and the best excuse is some cool new features or
appearance or special edition.”
Sportsman’s Warehouse, a retail chain that makes
almosthalf of its $660 million
in annual sales from hunting and shooting, believes its vast
firearm selection will help it steal some business from local
mom-and-pop stores, which it estimates command 65% of outdoor
activity and sporting goods equipment sales.
“You have a store that you're competing against, some
mom-and-pop that has only 25 firearms to choose from, and you walk
into that community and you offer 300 different firearms, you're
going to get people excited about buying,” CEO John Schaefer said
at a September conference. It helps that a lot of industry
marketing is centered on the availability of new products, he
said.
He continued: “To a lot of our customers, our male customers,
buying firearms is akin to females buying shoes. They want to have
20 or 30 firearms. Don't ask me why. They think they're cool. But
if you only have 25 to choose from, maybe you buy two. If you have
300 to choose from, over a number of years, you're probably going
to end up with 10 or 15 firearms. And we know that because a lot of
our customers will talk and they'll brag about having 30 or 40
firearms.”
The firearms reference collection at the Washington Metropolitan
Police Department headquarters in Washington.
Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press
The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates the average
target shooter recruited at 16 years old spends about $75,000 on
the sport in their lifetime. Sable noted that even before college,
a sixth-grader in the program might start out with a youth model
shotgun, hit a growth spurt, and get another gun, then buy yet
another gun before graduation.
"They want to have 20 or 30 firearms. Don't ask me why. They
think they're cool."
Hunting and shootings sports advocates have been brainstorming
ways to appeal to young people in recent years. The Hunting
Heritage Trust and the National Shooting Sports Foundation
commissioned a survey of 8- to 17-year-olds in 2012 that centered
on the influence of peers in youth attitudes toward hunting and
shooting. A subsequent
reporton the NSSF’s website
concluded: “The more familiar youth are with individuals their own
age who participate in hunting and shooting, the more likely they
will be to support and actively participate in these activities.”
That’s in line with what Fifer, the Sturm Ruger CEO,
told
Shooting Sports Retailerlast year — that every shooter needs
to introduce 12 new people to shooting each year.
The NSSF report, which found respondents to be more enthusiastic
about target shooting than hunting, recommended making a youth
ambassador program to help build social acceptance of both sports.
A big part of that job is helping their friends discover the fun of
shooting.
“Youth ambassadors and others should focus on getting newcomers
to take a first step into target shooting through any means,
whether a BB or pellet gun, paintball gun, or archery bow,” the
report said. “The point should be to get newcomers started shooting
something, with the natural next step being a move toward
actual firearms.”