Retailers Take Aim At Protecting Firearms Sales

When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a nationally televised gun control speech earlier this month, the responding press release came from Newtown, Conn.

That’s the home of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a lobbying group for the firearms industry.

Oddly enough though, the group’s in-state location doesn’t mean local firearms retailers have more than a shot in the dark at stopping an annual barrage of ideas for restricting guns.

Every year the Connecticut General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee passes new restrictions on the use or sale of guns. Tears flow freely in the meeting room, as family members of homicide victims recount tragic human losses and how lax restrictions led to them.
This year is no different. At the committee’s April 10 public hearing, Southington’s Laura Bachman recounted the execution-style murder of her brother, performed with illegally owned weapons.

“My brother was killed in part because it is too easy to get guns in Connecticut,” she said.
In all, about 20 people submitted testimony supporting three bills that would require better reporting of lost or stolen firearms.

And from the more than 100 Connecticut firearms dealers? Nothing. Not a word. And this in the state where Samuel Colt and Oliver Winchester made their names. One has to wonder if either would have been able to grow his business here today.

Lock ’N’ Load

With that in mind, the gun retailers have had enough. About six months ago, 20 of them had a meeting and decided to form the Connecticut Association of Firearms Retailers.

Guy Bignell, president and CEO of the Greenwich gun shop Griffin & Howe, is its first secretary. He said Connecticut residents don’t realize the effect firearms sales have on the state’s economy, and points to figures from a national lobbying group showing that state firearms sales account for more than $40 million in annual retail sales and thousands jobs.

“We need to protect the industry in terms of its contribution to the economy,” he said.
Although he sells mostly hunting rifles and shotguns, he said “the minute you mention the word ‘gun,’ people think of Glocks and machine guns.”

That’s not a good image to be toting around at the State Capitol.

So not surprisingly, the group’s first order of business was to hire a lobbyist. On the same day as the committee hearing, they signed a veteran: Gary Costa, a consultant to the National Rifle Association who has been lobbying East Coast states for years.

“They came together simply because they saw that a lot of these bills were directed right at them,” Costa said of the gun retailers.

He said there was little point in going before the judiciary committee, calling it “a ridiculous waste of time”.

“What they’re doing in Connecticut is an attempt to hamstring legal business. They’re trying to make doing business difficult for the firearms retailer,” he said.

The harder step for gun control advocates has been the Public Safety and Security Committee, which has traditionally been more cautious in regulating firearms.

And this time, instead of just hunters and sportsmen and someone from the NRA on the other side, there will be a local industry there, talking about jobs and the economy.

“I mean, this is the home of the firearms industry of America,” Bignell said.

“We’re just a little late to protect Winchester.”

Jonathan O’Connell is a Hartford Business Journal Staff Writer.