A third of Wal-Mart's stores will stop selling guns "based on diminished customer relevancy and demand in these markets" the company announced today.
Surprising? Not really. The dirty little secret in the gun industry is that gun ownership in America is rapidly shrinking--a fact often ignored by much of the news media and most Members of Congress. Despite persistent efforts to reach out to women, children, and minorities, the gun industry's primary customer base remains aging white men looking to add one more gun to their arsenal. And they're not getting any younger.
While the National Rifle Association continues to claim that "almost half" of American homes have guns, all reliable survey data shows the real number to be far lower. Most recently, the September 2005 edition of the journal Pediatrics estimated that less than a third of U.S. homes have guns. According to surveys from the National Opinion Research Center, from 1980 to 2004, gun ownership by men dropped from by more than 10 percentage points--from 52 percent to 41.3 percent. At the same time, gun ownership by women has remained statistically stagnant at an average of little more than 11 percent.
The marketplace has spoken and the losers are America's firearms industry and the gun lobby.