As word has spread about President Barack Obama’s executive order on firearms sales—officially announced Tuesday afternoon—orders from around the country are flooding Baton Rouge wholesaler Lipsey’s Inc. in what traditionally is already a busy time of year for the gun industry.
“Everyone is busy right now. If Obama had not come out with his executive order, I guarantee we would have been busy this week,” Laurie Aronson, president and CEO of Lipsey’s wholesale firearms distributor. “But truthfully, I don’t think the widespread desire to buy firearms has kicked in yet … I believe in the next week or two is when it will really start, really kick up.”
Obama’s executive action expands mandatory background checks to gun shows, flea markets and online sales; adds more than 230 examiners and staff to help process them; and calls on states to submit accurate and updated criminal history data.
“This is not a plot to take away everybody’s guns,” Obama said during a press conference Tuesday. “You pass a background check, you purchase a firearm. The problem is some gun sellers have been operating under a different set of rules.”
Despite Aronson’s belief that sales are destined to rise, orders to Lipsey’s from federally licensed dealers from across the country already have picked up in the past few days, maintaining a pattern that observers note has become common in recent years.
Once tragedy strikes, calls for stricter gun control laws follow and gun sales soar as worried gun enthusiasts sprint to their local store to stock up for fear that restrictions might make it tougher to buy guns.
As mass shootings have continued to occur with regularity in the U.S. over the past several years, gun sales have skyrocketed. According to the FBI, background checks for gun purchases have jumped 160% nationwide since 2005.
In Louisiana, background checks over that span are up 80%, from 207,954 in 2005 to 372,613 in 2015. Last year, nearly 164,000 background checks were conducted for handguns, more than 140,000 for long guns such as hunting rifles, and more 7,700 for people buying multiple guns.
Aronson says national security and personal protection concerns have driven those sales increases.
Rex Rainach, Internet sales manager for Jim’s Firearms on Siegen Lane, agrees.
“Concealed handguns have been on a steady increase,” he says. “I attribute that to terrorist attacks; people feel like they need something on them.”
Rainach says Jim’s Firearms has seen a steady increase in sales over the past few days, but nothing like mad rushes experienced in the past, such as after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012.
“People are getting nervous,” he says. “Anytime a shooting happens, we’ll get a little pick up, (but) it hasn’t been super crazy.”
—Ryan Broussard
