One aspect of the POSG is true to type, what Tam at VFTP finally admits is a “Gun Glut”. She’s even partly right about its cause.
But while the expectation of The Beast in the big chair was a driver of producers, wholesalers, and retailers gearing up and stocking up, that’s been going on for the better part of a decade. The tendency of the market to put supply ahead of anticipated demand has indeed glutted the market for much of that time but actual demand absorbed enough supply that all those three prongs of the industry kept expanding in a perverted version of “irrational exuberance”.
Until now. To riff on the commercial, “bubbles gonna bust, that’s what they do.” I took some heat for calling this more than a year ago, but I was seeing it from the inside of the retail prong, and even though the prospect of an anti-gun anti-Constitution anti-deplorable prog prez with balls to replace the one without them was a driver (and HEAVILY touted by the supply side), inventory levels had already started backing up with more buildup of the three prongs every day. And with the actual market largely satiated (have you SEEN that 10-year NICS chart?), it was a textbook example of the pendulum of actual as opposed to anticipated suppy/demand and the bubble pop would have happened albeit to a lesser and less immediate degree, even if the bitch had gotten the nod as expected.
Now as I’ve also said before, changes in regs and rules are pretty certain to up the market for heretofore artificially stunted materiel and a whole new supply/demand cycle will ensue, but cans can’t (heh) help absorb the millions of ar’s and glock clones that cram the warehouses and showcases right now…only reduced prices and disappearing profits will do that. And it will, there’s a demand for anything even when in oversupply if it’s cheap enough whether it’s guns or houses…which will take care of the glut in firearms themselves and through what will certainly be an accelerated attrition, the glut in the supply chain too…only the strongest will survive.
That’s just how capitalism works, and it’s ultimately a good thing. But don’t tell that to my buddy Tom, who after his 30-yr. retirement from LE sunk everything he had and everything he could borrow into a brand new 7000 sf state-of-the-art facility with a 2500 gun inventory, opening for business in October 2016. I did try to dissuade him for the whole year prior, much as I tried to tell blind investors in 2011 to stop having me order them 500-oz “monster boxes” of silver eagles when the crazed market had pushed them to over $50 per. Not that I’m any kind of guru; I in 40 years in those businesses never speculated or anticipated because there is way too much manipulation in every market. But I would have had to be blind not to see that something wasn’t right and was bound for “correction” as it were. Some lessons just have to be learned the hard way.
Anyway. “Gun Glut”. Regardless of the whens and whys, it’s a fact.
