Guns in their variety

[Eye5600]

I got to wondering if the mix of guns registered in the Classifieds on this forum is representative of the mix of guns being sold in the general population. The ads have a very heavy percentage of AR-15's and other modern semi-auto rifles. In hand guns, it's very heavy in pistols with a lot of 1911's.

If you had total guns sales for New England, would you see about the same mix, or would it be a lot higher in bolt and lever rifles, and revolvers?

 

[TomH]

How could anyone possibly guess such a thing? And also, who cares how many guns people sell to each other? Only intrusive government would...

 

[center442]

I got to wondering if the mix of guns registered in the Classifieds on this forum is representative of the mix of guns being sold in the general population. The ads have a very heavy percentage of AR-15's and other modern semi-auto rifles. In hand guns, it's very heavy in pistols with a lot of 1911's.

If you had total guns sales for New England, would you see about the same mix, or would it be a lot higher in bolt and lever rifles, and revolvers?

Really hard to say. When I first started posting here I had never fired an AR15 and didn't know what the attraction was. The posts here got me interested enough to buy one, and I got hooked. In my case the forum influenced what I owned.

Since this is a specialized forum (guns, with occasional forays into the world of cats), what folks own here may or not be representative of society in general. You're dealing with gun nuts here, a small, highly evolved, discriminating, and tasteful sub-group of all gun owners, so YMMV.

How could anyone possibly guess such a thing? And also, who cares how many guns people sell to each other? Only intrusive government would...

Completely agree with you, TomH. I took his question as more curiosity as to whether the classifieds reflected general buying trends in New England, and less about about who was selling what to who. Perhaps the OP will clarify a little?

 

[ShadeWPI]

As pointed out, this forum is going to be heavily biased since it's focused on shooters, and shooters from the North East. There are a great many more hunters than shooters buying guns, so I would expect the lower cost bolt-action hunting rifles to have greater sales volume than more expensive semi-automatics.

Pistols are a different story. I suspect semi-automatic pistol sales to be higher than revolver pistol sales for a couple of reasons. Most people who purchase a pistol are doing so with an interest in self-defense. (Handgun hunters are a significant minority) and self-loading pistols tend to be favored (for better or ill) by the public for self-defense.

I agree it would be interesting to look at the relative sales numbers, more out of curiosity than anything else.

 

[Eye5600]

Just curiosity. In any category, it's not the most interesting things that are the big sellers. Porches are more interesting than Chevys, but....

Just to make up an example, you might think in a rich, fairly urban place like West Hartford, the big sellers would be pistols for HD, and expensive shotguns for the range. But it's not who in West Hartford "needs" an AR, it's who in West Hartford wants an AR, and maybe that's a lot, and maybe it's only a few.