What new gun policy changes mean for the firearm industry

The Trump administration recently suspended parts of the 1934 National Firearms Act, allowing people to purchase certain guns like short-barrel rifles and shotguns, and gun accessories like silencers, without registering them with the government.

This morning, “Marketplace Morning Report” host Kimberly Adams spoke with Chip Brownlee, a reporter at The Trace who covers federal gun police.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. For the full interview, listen on the player above.

Kimberly Adams: President Trump said on the campaign trail that he would be a best friend to gun owners. How has he been doing on that promise so far?

Chip Brownlee: I mean, I think in a lot of ways he's fulfilling that promise for them. Five or six months ago, back in April, the Trump administration proposed more than three dozen regulations that essentially just roll back a lot of restrictions on guns, and one that a lot of people are concerned about is going to make it easier to sell guns online and ship guns to people's doors within the same state.

Adams: You waded through tens of thousands of the public comments coming in about these regulatory changes. What were people saying?

Brownlee: With most of the three dozen regulations that we looked at, most of them were overwhelmingly positive, and I think that that is kind of a reflection of the organizing might of kind of the gun rights organizations. They're able to get people out to support those proposals, but there were interestingly a few proposals. One of them being that online sales proposal that got mostly negative feedback. So you had a kind of strange bedfellows of small gun dealers coming together with gun violence prevention groups to oppose that proposal for a couple of different reasons. One is the public safety concern about selling guns online. These small gun dealers are kind of, like, on the front lines of making sure people who shouldn't have a gun because of a mental health condition, because of criminal intent, they're trying to straw purchase a gun for somebody else who shouldn't have one. That they're on the front lines of stopping that from happening. But the gun dealers themselves are also worried about their businesses, right? Because if these bigger companies, like an Amazon of guns, could sell guns online, then that would potentially put their small gun stores out of business.

Adams: Say more about that. Like, where do most people buy guns right now, and how would that change?

Brownlee: Most people buy guns right now in these small gun stores across the country. But if you have, for example, the online sales rule, you could have bigger companies come in, set up shop, and then maybe take over the market and sell guns at a lower price. Because right now, most gun sellers don't make most of their profit off of the guns themselves, they make their profit off of ammunition, off of the accessories that that they sell. So, if you have this kind of big shakeup in the market, you really could see all of those small gun sellers go out of business.

Adams: In addition to the regulatory changes underway that are affecting the gun industry, there's also quite a few big business developments. For example, Smith & Wesson, major gun maker, just acquired Savage Arms, and that's making it the largest commercial firearms manufacturer in the country. How big of a deal is this merger, and what does that mean for sort of the industry landscape?

Brownlee: I think it's a pretty big deal because it's part of this trend of consolidation that we're seeing not just in the gun space but in American business in general. And I think that's these small dealers' concerns, right? That these new rules and regulations might make it easier for the industry to consolidate.