What Happens to Gun and Ammo Sales During an Election Year?

I hate election season. Right when it seems like America is getting back to normal after losing our collective minds over the last one, we start frothing at the mouths for some other political dog and pony show.

We get riled up over a lot of things, and one of them is always guns and ammo. Historically, gun and ammo sales spike during election years. A lot of that happens because of uncertainty about how a candidate will handle the firearms industry. However, each election since George W Bush has seen gun sales spike. Let’s explore what that looks like and the reasons behind it.

Number of FBI background checks for firearms purchases per year. Note the steady increase during Obama years (2008-2016) and huge spikes in 2016 and 2020 (source).

2020 Election

This probably won’t be news to many gun enthusiasts, but 2020 set off the biggest civilian gun buying spree in the history of the world. There were several reasons for that (two weeks to flatten the curve!), but one of the biggest was the election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Gun sales nearly doubled between June of 2019 and June of 2020, and about 1.8M guns were sold in September of 2020 amid fears of a brewing civil conflict. What set this buying spree apart from previous ones, though, was that there was a significant increase in new gun buyers. One report by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) found that nearly half of the people who bought a gun in 2020 were first-time buyers.

2016 Election and Firearms

When people think of Donald Trump’s presidency, they don’t typically think of heavy-handed gun control laws. Gun and ammo prices generally mellowed out during Trump’s presidency to levels unseen since before Obama.

What a lot of people overlook when they see that kind of data is the run up to the 2016 election – and who was running. In the months leading up to the election, most people were convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to beat Trump, and Clinton has never been what you’d call a “gun rights advocate.”

Clinton had said before that she wanted a federal handgun registry, and to expand FBI background checks. During his campaign, Trump also played up fears that Clinton would appoint pro-gun control justices to the Supreme Court.

With that context, the spike in gun sales leading up to the 2016 election makes a lot more sense. In October of 2016 alone, the FBI processed 350,000 more background checks than usual for that month. Sturm, Ruger & Co (the largest firearm manufacturer in the US) also reported huge earnings leading up to the election.

After the election, however, sales slumped, since the public perceived Trump to be a “pro-gun” candidate.

The Obama Elections and Firearms Sales

Gun sales really started to balloon during Barack Obama’s campaign and presidency. I had just graduated from high school when Obama was elected for the first time, and I was pretty disconnected from politics. I also wasn’t really interested in firearms yet, so I wasn’t privy to how his election affected the gun world.

One of the things that I overlooked in my youth was how many Americans were legitimately afraid that Obama would ban the sale of firearms in the US. According to a Gallup poll from 2009, more than half of American gun owners surveyed said that they believed Obama would “try to ban guns.”

They weren’t alone, either - 41% of all Americans (even non-gun owners) believed that Obama would pursue this course of action.

That all translated into a huge run on guns. One local gun shop in Virginia said at the time that his sales leading up to the 2008 election outpaced what he saw after 9/11 and Y2K. By the time Obama left office, gun sales had surged from 7 million units in a single year to 30 million in 2016.

Setting the Stage: George W. Bush

These spikes in gun sales didn’t just spontaneously pop into existence, though. Before the Obama elections, George W. Bush solidified himself as one of the most pro-gun presidents of the modern era. These spikes in gun sales would have been impossible without him.

That’s because of two key events during Bush’s presidency. First, the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 expired in 2004, giving many Americans access to firearms they hadn’t had in a decade. Bush also signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which protected gun companies from lawsuits arising from situations where their products were used to cause harm.

These two actions together essentially set us on the path to where we are today. You can see us hitting the beginning of an election-inspired gun sale spike even today. That translates to higher prices for the consumer (check out our previous story on that here).

Does that mean that you should try to wait out election season to let prices fall before your next gun purchase? That might not be a bad idea, but you’d definitely be taking a chance. Who knows what the future holds?