Why It May Be Impossible to Measure the Impact of Stores Limiting Gun Sales<br />“Tracking a gun is harder than tracking a package — you know at a high level how<br />many firearms are manufactured, but you don’t know where they went from there.”<br />The end result is an industry that sees its numbers recorded only in broad strokes,<br />and fewer of those strokes in each step of the way from manufacturer to retailer to buyer to second owner.<br />At Dick’s Sporting Goods, revenue from hunting products, including rifles, constitute<br />10 percent or less of annual sales, according to another Wedbush report.<br />In an era when the toy industry can pinpoint the overall value of all dolls sold domestically each year<br />and the federal government tracks the number of trucks sold in any given month, data on gun sales is obscured by foggy reporting standards and loopholes.<br />For example, a 1996 provision known as the Dickey Amendment effectively barred the Centers for Disease Control from tapping taxpayer funds set aside for injury prevention<br />and control for research that could be used for gun control advocacy.<br />On Thursday, the company said that revenue from its firearms segment for the third quarter slumped 40.6 percent<br />from last year to $117.6 million, compared with a 13.4 percent upswing in its outdoor products division.<br />But whether those changes will actually have a meaningful effect on gun sales is difficult — if not impossible — to know.
