The Gun Whore Effect

I have a new theory on the decline of the industry. Like all the other theories it's short on verifiable facts but there is at least a certain logic to it--unlike some of the others, for example, oh, I don't know, say the trickle down theory of robotic hordes of ballers shooting mad paint because that's what the insignificant One Percenters do. (Not to be confused with the punk ass tourney wannabes swarming unwary fields across the country like a plague of locusts. Shooting mad paint. At high ROF.) And while I wouldn't give this theory a primary role in the decline it could have served to make matters worse after the fashion of what repackaged mortgage debt did for financial institutions during the real estate collapse--and beyond. I call it the Gun Whore Effect.

It might more properly be called the Turnover Effect but that doesn't have the panache of The Gun Whore Effect. Gun whores, in fact, have been with us almost as long as the game has been played. Once different kinds and brands of markers hit the market the gun whore soon followed. The gun whore is, of course, that select group of ballers who can't resist the next hot gat and will buy as many of them as possible--sometimes selling older guns in the process, sometimes not. There is also a gun whore lite group that may not have a stash of markers but must have the latest and greatest and as a consequence goes through guns faster than Tiger Woods does cocktail waitresses. The result is gun whores churn the turnover rate in gun sales well above the norm.

It used to be that gun manufacturers made guns and aftermarket shops customized them. Eventually manufacturers began to try and tap the custom market and in no time at all the cycle of "new" gun introductions was annual. In creating an annual turnover cycle manufacturers overheated the marketplace (although since this first occurred during the big growth years it went unnoticed.) Amongst gun whores the effect was to accelerate the rate of turnover; both buying more guns faster than the average but also dumping more used guns back into the market as well. When demand was still rising it didn't matter but as soon as demand flattened (and/or declined) the result was a market glutted with used guns of virtually identical performance and nothing like enough newcomers to sop up the excess and still buy new at anything like the volume the manufacturers had come to expect.

Today that glut continues and continues to depress new sales while manufacturers are stuck trying to differentiate their latest gear from last year's and perhaps even incongruously relying on the gun whore portion of the market for even their reduced sales. And since player numbers have been calculated based on new sales nobody really knows how the numbers stack up, only that the sales aren't there. The one thing I would be willing to bet is that there are a lot of guns collecting dust in a lot of closets.