Mirroring National Trend, Gun Sales Spike

Businesses in the Huntington area report that in recent weeks there has been a dramatic spike in gun sales and requests for help obtaining pistol licenses, mirroring widely reported state and national trends.

Local merchants involved in business associated with firearms report that the tragic shootings in Aurora, Colo., and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut have resulted in a dramatic jump in consumer interest in guns.

“Right now, if you were to call any gun dealer around, they’d tell you they’re sold out,” said Robert Ishkanian, a manager at Edelman‘s pistol permit service on Jericho Turnpike. “And we‘re getting a lot of inquiries about how to get a gun.”

“The spike in interest here absolutely mirrors the national trend,” added John Sweezey, owner of Sweezey’s Campsite Sport Shop on New York Avenue in Huntington Station.

According to the FBI, which keeps track of criminal background checks as mandated by the Brady Act of 1993, there was a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of background checks requested nationwide in December 2012 (approximately 2.8 million) compared to the same month in 2011.

State statistics show a similar jump in December, approximately 66 percent higher than the same period in 2011, at 48,320.

Not only are these some of the largest spikes and the highest raw numbers recorded by the FBI since they implemented the system, they come as background checks have grown steadily across the nation and in New York during the past 14 years.

Nationally the annual number has risen steadily from 9.1-19.6 million in 2012. In New York, that annual number has grown from approximately 186,000  to over 338,000.

The spikes, say Ishkanian and Sweezey, are a well-established pattern in the business. “We’ve seen it happen 25 times in the last 40 years,” said Ishkanian, whose company assists people in the sometimes complicated process of obtaining a license for a pistol. “When there’s a crazy incident, people look for solutions -- and one area that always seem to come up is, if we ban the guns, we’ll eliminate the problem. When that happens, there’s a lot more interest in people owning and buying guns.”

“Every time a situation happens that is horrible and tragic, there’s talk that they want to make laws that maybe make it harder to own a gun,“ agreed Sweezey. “That fuels an increase in interest -- people want to be grandfathered in.”

Laws regarding gun ownership are very complicated, and differ depending on the jurisdiction. “Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, they‘re all different,” said Ishkanian. “You almost have to be a lawyer to wade through the rules.”

That’s where Edelman’s comes in. “We’re like the HR Block,” he said. “We help people get through the process, do it properly.”

To Sweezey’s mind, the current spike is unprecedented, and he points to influence of a pervasive news and social media as part of the reason why. “I’ve seen it before, but not like this,” he said. “This is the Clinton assault rifle ban, y2k, and Obama’s two elections, all rolled into one.”

Ishkanian, whose company has seen a 50 percent increase in requests for license assistance in recent weeks, disagrees.

“It’s a highly charged emotional situation," he said. "But it’s basically the same as with previous incidents. This spike will last for another month, then there’ll be some other thing in the news.”