BR gun stores see sales spike

• By CHAD CALDER
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Nov 12, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Baton Rouge gun stores are seeing the same spike in weapons sales as their national counterparts.

They attribute the increase to president-elect Obama’s position on gun control issues and the questions opponents raised about his motives and his fitness to be president.

Jim McClain, of Jim’s Firearms, on Siegen Lane, said business is up 30 percent from people buying the semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity clips subject to the federal assault weapons ban, which was in effect from 1994 to 2004.

McClain said Obama is on record supporting reinstating the ban, and that a number of semiautomatic weapons popular with law-abiding gun enthusiasts were included in the ban, particularly the AR-15.

“People have a legitimate concern for the next four years of losing our Second Amendment rights for certain types of firearms,” McClain said.

Randall Dupont, gun department manager at Bowie Outfitters, said sales of so-called “black guns” — they lack the brown coloration common on shotguns and hunting rifles — have doubled during the past three weeks.

“They’re scared six months from now they won’t have the choice to buy them,” he said.

McClain said the increase is second only to the spike he saw after Hurricane Katrina, which spawned news reports of riots and looting and displaced many New Orleans residents to Baton Rouge.

McClain said the buying is also fueled by a general sense of unease among many, with the financial crisis, instability the Middle East and Russia and “a president-elect that makes a lot of people uneasy.”

“They’re looking for things that make them feel secure,” he said.

McClain said this unease is fueled by charges — some leveled by the McCain/Palin campaign directly and others that circulated on the Internet — that Obama, who is Christian, is a Muslim, has ties to terrorists and is insufficiently patriotic.

“It makes people uneasy about the future of our free country,” he said, “myself included.”

McClain said he’s not one to believe every conspiracy theory, but added “there is some question as to how our president-elect is going to handle our national security, and that’s an important issue.”