SPRINGFIELD -- Faced with declining consumer demand for guns and increasing calls for tighter gun restrictions, the parent company of Smith & Wesson will release its annual earnings report Wednesday.

Guns are 85 percent of sales at Springfield-based American Outdoor Brands -- the parent company of Smith & Wesson. Firearm sales were down 60 percent in the company's third quarter and are down 46 percent over the first three quarters of the company's fiscal year, according to American Outdoor Brands' most recent annual report to investors (available here as a PDF).

Company executives will update those numbers with results from its fiscal year, which ended April 30, during an announcement on its investors website.

American Outdoor Brands has 1,600 employees at its Springfield plant.

Analysts at Zacks Equity Research predict American Outdoor Brands' fourth-quarter earnings of 11 cents a share, a decline of 80.7 percent, and revenues of $182.9 million, a decrease of 20.2 percent year over year.

On Tuesday, American Outdoor Brands stock (AOBC on Nasdaq) was selling at $12.95 a share, down from the $23.70 a share the stock sold for a year ago.

AOBC sold $773 million worth of handguns and rifles in fiscal 2017, up from $652 million in FY 2016 and $531.2 million in fiscal 2015.

In the third quarter of this year, net sales of all Smith & Wesson products including firearms and other goods were $157.4 million, compared with $233.5 million for the third quarter last year, a decrease of 32.6 percent.

Gun sales are cyclical, and demand tends to rise when Democrats are in the White house and gun enthusiasts fear tighter restrictions on what they can buy and even who can buy guns and accessories like magazines and sound suppressors

(silencers).

Gunmakers use statistics the FBI keeps on the number of background checks it processes for prospective gun buyers as a rough measure of demand. There were 27 million checks in 2016, the year of the presidential election, and 25 million in 2017. There were 11.3 million through May of this year, although gun sales pick up at the end of the year.

Activists continue to protest periodically outside Smith & Wesson's Roosevelt Avenue plant, calling on the company to back stricter gun control. The company never meets with them.

Horace Smith and Daniel Baird Wesson formed their partnership in 1852. Through the years, Smith & Wesson became famous for its revolvers, making them for Old West figures, police and allied arsenals in both World Wars.

Clint Eastwood brandished a Smith & Wesson Model n 29 in "Dirty Harry."