A couple of articles came to our attention recently that had info about the gun industry that most people don’t know. It’s worth being informed about how this stuff works. Especially if you’re likely to encounter anti-gun relatives over the coming holiday season. It’s always nice to be “armed” with facts, as it were.
Firstly, It’s morbid, but whenever there’s a mass shooting like the one in Texas or the one in Las Vegas, gun stocks rise. This is because the stock trade counts on gun enthusiasts buying more guns or hoarding guns and gun parts in case any new restrictions arise as a result of the shooting incident.
Since US lawmakers aren’t quick to change laws and companies know that there’s profit to be made whenever there’s a gun incident, foreign businesses are increasingly looking to set up shop in the United States. In particular, German weapons makers are increasingly seeing the United States as a source of profit. For instance, Heckler & Koch (H&K), based in Oberndorf, Germany, is currently building a $23 million gun factory in Columbus, Georgia. This factory is expected to bring 84 new jobs to that town. Many of those jobs will be German and US engineering jobs. We can’t say that new jobs of any kind is really a bad thing. That factory will exclusively make “sports and hunting” weapons for the US civilian market. The company’s military guns will still be made in Germany.
This change is also coming in part because President Trump may be making it more difficult to export goods from other countries into the US, so the foreign companies want to make sure they have a market here before that happens.
Back to the stock topic…
After the Las Vegas shooting incident, the stock of Sturm, Ruger & Co. and American Outdoor Brand Corp. (formerly Smith & Wesson) rose 5.7%.
The biggest owners of American Outdoor Brands and Sturm, Ruger are stock investment companies called Vanguard and BlackRock. Together, those two companies own more than a quarter of Sturm Ruger’s shares and 22 percent of American Outdoor Brands, according to FactSet. Some of these stocks are called index funds, and these two companies both hold gun industry index funds. Because of this, many investors own gun stocks without realizing it. If an employer has a 401K account, many of those accounts own index funds.
Ask this question…”Do you own gun industry stocks?” Their answer may lead you to having an interesting discussion. Keep this in mind if you’re ever discussing the gun industry and need some facts about where the money hides.
