According to preliminary sales numbers collected by the ATF and crunched by the National Shooting Sports Federation, 2011 was a record-breaking year for gun sales. Americans bought 17.2% more guns in 2011 than the did in 2010, which was itself a record-breaking year. When you’re done cheering, make the jump for the full statistics.
Here’s the breakdown of revolvers, pistols, rifles and shotguns. The handgun sales are categorized by caliber and type, and they show some interesting trends about Americans’ changing and ever-increasing appetite for all things ballistic. Categories showing a year-on-year sales increase are highlighted in bold.
| CATEGORY |
2010 |
2011 |
CHANGE |
| Pistols to .22 |
374,505 |
337,667 |
+0.8% |
| Pistols to .25 |
21,272 |
19,167 |
-11.8% |
| Pistols to .32 |
39,792 |
13,889 |
-65.1% |
| Pistols to .380 |
665,512 |
537,063 |
-19.3% |
| Pistols to 9mm |
630,217 |
840,089 |
+33.3% |
| Pistols to .50 (incl .40, .45) |
526,702 |
699,911 |
+32.9% |
| Revolvers to .22 |
131,543 |
153,739 |
+16.8% |
| Revolvers to .32 |
8,605 |
5,182 |
-39.8% |
| Revolvers to .38 Spl |
210,762 |
206,185 |
-2.2% |
| Revolvers to .357 Mag |
126,525 |
125,237 |
-1.0% |
| Revolvers to .44 Mag |
45,361 |
35,773 |
-21.1% |
| Revolvers to .50 (incl .45) |
36,131 |
46,682 |
+29.2% |
| Rifles (not by caliber) |
1,830,556 |
2,293,347 |
+25.3% |
| Shotguns (not by caliber) |
743,378 |
862,293 |
+16.0% |
| Misc. Firearms |
67,929 |
182,730 |
+169% |
| TOTAL |
5,459,240 |
6,398,854 |
+17.2% |
For a host of economic, political and sociological reasons, Americans bought even more guns last year than they did the year before. Gun sales simply rocked, although some rocked more than others. I’ll spare you the bad recoil-related puns and similes; you can thank me later.
Total handgun sales are up by about 7%, while shotguns are booming with a 16% increase and rifles sales shot up by 25%. (I only said I’d spare you the bad recoil puns.) Breaking the handgun numbers down by caliber, we can see some interesting trends evident here.
First off, we see a complete collapse in the mouse gun market, by which I mean anything bigger than a .22 but smaller and weaker than the 9mm or .38 Special. Excluding the slumping .380 (down by ‘only’ 19%) this market segment shrank by a shocking 45% last year.
This news is disastrous for manufacturers who specialize in these marginal calibers, but it’s good for us shooters because those calibers basically suck anyway. One exception being the excellent but unpopular .327 Federal. It’s a whole story in its own right, but I’ve been wondering why new Taurus .327 revolvers were being dumped for $239 recently and now I know why. In any case, the land of .25 and .32 caliber handguns is already a tiny market segment, and I expect it to shrink even more as the snubnose .38/.357 and subcompact 9mm continue to evolve.
The .38 Special and .357 Magnum sold slightly fewer guns in 2011, possibly because the full-size revolver market is mature and largely stagnant from a technological standpoint. I believe the snubnose revolver is being crowded out of the CCW market (and CCW holsters) by the boom in subcompact 9mms.
And this draws our attention to the booming market for automatic pistols in anything 9mm and larger. Americans bought a shitload of full-caliber autos in 2010, and they bought 1.33 shitloads of them in 2011. Many of these, I have reason to believe, were compact and subcompact models.
The ageless .22 rimfire continues to hold its own in the pistol market and carves out an impressive 16.8% gain in the revolver niche.. There aren’t too many new .22 revolver designs out there, so I’m currently puzzled as to which models are driving this solid uptick in sales. They can’t all be Ruger SP-101s, can they? Stay tuned for further analysis as we get more numbers to crunch.
The revolver market is slightly down in general, although sales of the smallest (.22) and largest (.45, .454, .480, .475 and .500) revolvers are up. The collapse of the .32 market is no surprise, but I didn’t expect the 21% decline in .41 Magnum and .44 Special/Magnum sales. If people are so bored of big revolvers, why are they buying 29% more of the very biggest ones? (Maybe the simple answer is that Joe Matafome secretly bought himself several thousand more S&W .500s, but I doubt it.)
These sales figures are fantastic news for the shooting sports industry, and they also start to explain why manufacturers aren’t flooding us with test guns this year: they’re already selling anything that goes bang (with the exception of mouse guns) as quickly as they can manufacture them.