Gun sales at Smith & Wesson are projected to be up a massive 27% year-on-year when the company reports earnings on Tuesday – news that comes days after the sixth deadliest shooting spree in US history.

Gun stocks have soared this year. The share price at Smith & Wesson, which makes a third of all revolvers owned in the US, is currently at an eight-year high and closed at $20.44 on Monday, with most analysts predicting more gains to come. British-born chief executive James Debney will address analysts on Tuesday afternoon after the stock markets close and update investors on its projected sales for 2015 and beyond.

Debney, whose compensation topped $1.9m last year, has not been shy of linking massacres to rising gun sales in the past. In 2013 he attributed Smith & Wesson’s sudden rise in sales after the Sandy Hook primary school massacre to “fear and uncertainty that there might be increased gun control”, which he said “drove many new people to buy firearms for the first time”.

“You can see after a tragedy, there’s also a lot of buying,” the company’s chief financial officer, Jeff Buchanan, told investors at the RBC Capital Markets conference in September, according to the Intercept.

Debney is one of the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) largest donors and has passionately defended the second amendment right to bear arms.

Smith & Wesson’s stock price and major gun-related news. Photograph: The Guardian/Google Finance

This year looks set to be one of the best in recent history for pistol and revolver sales at the 163-year-old company he heads, and for its peers, as analysts forecast higher sales of handguns driven by fear of a clampdown in gun ownership in the wake of a series of mass shootings.

So far their predictions are holding true. So many people wanted to buy guns on Black Friday, six days before the San Bernardino shooting but the same day as three people were killed in a shoot out in Colorado Springs, that they were applying at an average rate of two background checks per second.



The day of the San Bernardino shooting, which claimed 14 lives, Smith & Wesson announced it had sold its millionth Shield – a lightweight 9mm pistol designed for concealed carry. A major selling point on a recent model Shield is the lack of a safety (colloquially known as the “no-safety Shield”).



Sales have only increased since the latest murder spree. ABC News reported on Monday that “[t]he line was out the door” at a San Bernardino, California, gun shop on Sunday morning as gun buyers queued to buy new weapons.

On Sunday, President Barack Obama once more called for tighter gun controls in the wake of the 353rd mass shooting this year – a move analysts said would probably spur more sales.

James Debney, CEO of Smith & Wesson, in Ring of Freedom, the NRA’s magazine. Photograph: Screengrab

Indeed, when talk of divestment from gun companies began in earnest after the December 2012 murder of 20 first-graders and six adults, shares in the company dropped. But when talk of gun control began in earnest, Smith & Wesson shares spiked sharply on fear among the general public that politicians might restrict access to guns, coupled with certainty among investors that no such thing would happen.



Brian Ruttenbur, an analyst with financial services firm BB&T, said Obama’s call for greater gun control after Sandy Hook had resulted in the best year ever for gun sales, and that the same effect was in play today. “The spike in the stock today is President Obama’s fireside Oval Office chat saying ‘I’m coming after you, gun companies,’” he told the Guardian on Monday. “The last time he did that we had the best year on record for gun sales. So if I was a gun manufacturer I would just say, ‘Thank you, President Obama.’”

Debney is a member of the NRA’s Golden Ring of Freedom, an honour reserved for everyone who has contributed more than $1m to the NRA. The high status comes with a special recognition ceremony, invitations to the NRA’s private events, and a “custom Golden Ring of Freedom blazer”.

“It is imperative that we hold fast to the freedoms that the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights provide our citizens,” Debney said in an interview with the NRA’s Ring of Freedom magazine. “Those freedoms cannot and must not be negotiated.” Debney graduated from the University of Manchester (UK) in 1989. He was previously a managing director at Alcoa, where he looked after a division overseeing trash bags and kitchen wraps.

Smith & Wesson is also in competition for a very lucrative contract with the US army to supply a new handgun to replace the Beretta M9. The contract could be worth as much as $580m.

While spikes in gun sales tend to correspond to the calls for gun control that follow grisly crimes, parts of the gun market appear to be on a steady upward slope even in times of relative calm.

Ruttenbur attributes that spike to generalized fear – especially of Muslims and of African American protesters. “There’s a lot of fear right now of violence with everything going on in anti-Muslim movements and anti-black movements,” he said. “There’s this white fear going on – [people think] ‘It’s an unsafe world, and I need to be armed.’”

But the surge may not necessarily result in another record year. The sales spike is confined largely to handguns, which sell for as little as $300, whereas rifles sell for anywhere from $800 to $1,500 and above, according to Ruttenbur. There’s also a less vigorous market for cheap rifles than there is for cheap handguns.

“Rifle sales are down, so I think the year will be flattish,” Ruttenbur said. “All we need are three more speeches by President Obama saying he wants to ban long guns and people will go out and buy a bunch of MSRs [modern sporting rifles] they don’t need.”

The other factor, said Ruttenbur, is simply that people want what they can’t have. “If the federal government says ‘we’re going to ban all toasters’, even if you don’t want a toaster you might go out and buy one.”