The gun industry turned the AR-15 into its most profitable creation, and we’re all paying the price.
I had spent two years working as an editor on magazines like AR Rifleman, Ballistic, Black Guns, Combat Handguns, and Tactical Weapons, but I still didn’t know what to expect when I attended the gun industry’s largest annual trade show — the ill-named Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show held in Las Vegas every January — a few weeks after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Would there be a memorial for the 20 students and six teachers who were murdered? Would Bushmaster, the company that manufactured the killer’s AR-15, even attend?
Maybe there would be signs indicating that the industry was reconsidering selling military-grade weapons to civilians. Indeed, the only distinction between the military’s M16 and the AR-15s sold to civilians is that the former can fire automatically, allowing a soldier to unleash multiple shots with a single trigger pull. Thanks to a federal law designed to crack down on Tommy guns in the 1930s, the civilian version is semiautomatic, requiring a trigger pull for each shot.
Otherwise, the rifles are identical. They both use the same gas operating system, the same plastic and aluminum components to reduce weight, the same controls. Both can fire the same bullets, which leave the barrel at well over 2,000 miles per hour — over three times as fast as a 9 mm bullet leaves a handgun — and eviscerate multiple organs and shatter bones. Both have light recoil impulses, making them more accurate, especially in rapid fire. Both are quick to reload using magazines that hold anywhere from 10 to 100 rounds of ammunition.
Of course, that year’s SHOT Show was no different than any other. There was no self-reflection, no hint of changing course.
In response to the Sandy Hook shooting, the Freedom Group, a conglomerate that owned several firearm brands, simply moved the Bushmaster section of its city-block-sized booth to another part of the SHOT Show floor at the Venetian Expo Center, one that was less prominent. That’s it; the company didn’t want to give outside reporters easy access to the gun that the Sandy Hook killer had wielded.
Like many other exhibitors, Bushmaster still had dozens of AR-15s on display. When I walked by, an employee in a red polo shirt smiled at me, seemingly unconcerned that the rifles on the tables and walls around him were identical to the one used in such a heinous murder.
Yes, a few industry professionals I spoke to were worried about what had just happened — but their concern was not for the families of the victims or those who survived, but for their own bottom lines. They worried that lawmakers might reenact the federal assault weapons ban that had expired in 2004 and cut off a big source of revenue.
Because the truth is that AR-15s are very profitable. This is why gunmakers have insisted on manufacturing and selling them even after their use in the country’s deadliest mass shootings — in Aurora, Newtown, San Bernardino, Parkland, Sutherland Springs, Uvalde, Buffalo, Highland Park, just recently in Midtown Manhattan and countless other places. The mass shooting in Las Vegas, where a gunman used 14 AR-15s outfitted with bump stocks to mimic machine gun fire and kill 60 concertgoers and wound more than 400 more, occurred just two miles down the Strip from where the SHOT Show is held, but you wouldn’t know it from walking the show floor, where thousands of AR-15s debut every year.
Profit in its sights
The AR-15 is a rather simple design, and that fact is key to its profitability. This isn’t like an iPhone, which takes billions of dollars of sophisticated research to design and refine, or like a modern automobile, which has hundreds if not thousands of moving parts and sensitive safety technology. If you know how one AR-15-style rifle works, you know how they all work. That’s why the name for one very specific Colt AR-15 now represents an entire class of weapons. A manufacturer might install a longer barrel on one model, or a different stock on another, but the configuration remains the same.
These guns also are easy to assemble with hand tools. If you can assemble an Ikea dresser, you can build an AR-15 — possibly in less time and with fewer expletives.
Finally, while a few key components of AR-15s are made of steel, namely the barrel and bolt, every other part is made of either aluminum or plastic — materials that are relatively cheap to produce in bulk. Manufacturers rely on a handful of forges to complete their aluminum parts or use computer-controlled machinery to cut blocks of raw aluminum into their desired shapes. The plastic is injection-molded.
Put all of this together, and gunmakers can forgo research and development, and even skilled labor, to reproduce the same gun over and over again. In 2011, Smith & Wesson, the country’s largest gunmaker, told its investors that the civilian AR-15 market, which has grown through aggressive marketing, was worth an estimated $489 million, and the Freedom Group claimed that the AR-15 market segment grew by 27% from 2007 to 2011, compared to the 3% growth of all long guns.
At scale, I estimate that it costs an established gunmaker less than $100 to manufacture one AR-15 that they can then sell for between $400 and $2,000. (For comparison, author Paul Barrett said that it costs Glock $65 to produce one pistol that sells for $500 to $600 — and it’s why so many other gunmakers now sell competing designs.) Cheap AR-15s come in cardboard boxes with no frills or extras; the higher-end models arrive in hard-sided cases with more durable parts and finishes and additional magazines.
What doesn’t change is what a .223 Remington or 5.56 mm NATO bullet — the most common ammunition used in AR-15s — will do to the human body. As numerous doctors and trauma surgeons have said, it’s much harder for people to survive even one .223 gunshot than multiple 9 mm wounds.
A platform for more purchases
With a handgun, you can buy a box of ammunition and hit the shooting range. With an AR-15, ammunition is just the beginning. You’ll likely need to buy sights or an optic (such as a scope) to aim and hit your target with the rifle, a sling to carry it, and a case for storing and transporting it (if you chose the $400 Cardboard Special). Thanks to the gun industry’s marketing tactics, you might want to install a forward grip to mitigate recoil, a laser or flashlight for better aiming and target identification, or a silencer to reduce the rifle’s sound signature, making it harder for bystanders to figure out where a gunshot came from.
Because of how easy it is to fire off 30 rounds, you’ll need more magazines, not to mention tools for quickly refilling those magazines. And much more ammunition. Before you know it, you’re buying 1,000-round boxes of .223 Remington ammunition, or military-surplus 5.56 mm NATO rounds designed to punch through steel helmets hundreds of yards away. These “barrier penetrating” rounds are cheap because of taxpayer subsidies.
In this way, this gun is like an iPhone; it’s an entry point into an ecosystem of products and companies.
According to a survey conducted in December 2021 for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s trade association, 86% of AR-15 owners said that they had accessorized their most recently acquired rifles with extra magazines, optics and sights, grips, slings, flashlights and other products, and spent an average of $618 on those purchases. Three-quarters of the respondents said they had added accessories to their rifles within a year of purchasing them, and 37% said that they planned to purchase a silencer within a year of taking the survey.
To capitalize on this phenomenon, Smith & Wesson — whose AR-15s were used in the Aurora, San Bernardino, Parkland, Poway and Highland Park mass shootings — bought Gemtech and Crimson Trace, companies that manufacture silencers and weapon-mounted lights and lasers, respectively. Other larger gunmakers, such as Ruger and SIG Sauer, have diversified by offering more products compatible with AR-15s, including optics, silencers and high-capacity magazines.
Creating a market
The profit margins of AR-15s help explain why dozens of large gun manufacturers and countless smaller gun shops build and sell them, and scores of companies produce parts and accessories so their owners can customize and modify them. In terms of size, the AR-15 ecosystem of aftermarket parts and customization is unrivaled in the gun world, and gun owners call AR-15s either “Legos for men” or “Barbies for men.”
Today, the gun industry’s trade association boasts that over 30 million AR-15s and other assault weapons have been produced in the U.S. This figure is distorted, because it does not distinguish between military, police or civilian rifles and appears to include those in the hands of prohibited owners, such as criminals and domestic abusers, and rifles that have been illegally trafficked. The association states that it arrived at its number using firearm production data from the ATF — which does not separate semiautomatic rifles from non-semiautomatic rifles, and many companies produce both — and “industry estimates,” but the organization has never published the underlying data.
Still, one must wonder: How did we get here? It’s an illuminating story.
Colt first began selling semiautomatic AR-15s to civilians in 1964. For the next 30 years — until the federal assault weapons ban was enacted in 1994 — the company and its competitors struggled to sell the rifles made of plastic and aluminum, unlike the wood and steel rifles before them. Records show that Colt and the few other companies that copied its design manufactured fewer than 800,000 AR-15s between 1964 and 1994, compared to millions of hunting rifles and shotguns produced in that time frame.
Well into the 2000s, gun owners predominantly shunned AR-15s and similar assault weapons that they deemed too “military” or “tactical” for civilian life. They didn’t need a combat rifle designed for rapid-fire engagements and quick reloading to hunt or shoot competitively or protect themselves. In his book “Gunfight,” Ryan Busse, another former member of the industry, explained how a group of gun writers stopped a young man from firing an AR-15 at a shooting range in 2004, saying that “normal people” don’t use those kinds of guns.
So what changed? The gun became a symbol of power and defiance. It’s a story of marketing shaping politics and culture, and politics and culture shaping marketing.
After lobbying for Congress to allow the federal assault weapons ban to expire in 2004, the gun industry poured millions into rebranding the AR-15 for a new batch of customers, overwhelmingly men who were seeing footage of soldiers carrying M16 rifles and shorter M4 variants into battle in Iraq and Afghanistan and wanted that same firepower, perhaps to amplify their masculinity. This is why gunmakers like Daniel Defense depicted soldiers carrying AR-15s in their ads and promised that customers could “Use What They Use.” In other words, civilians could simply buy AR-15s and cosplay as their American heroes overseas.
Some of the magazines I worked on focused exclusively on the AR-15’s military pedigree. Others made it a point to showcase the rifles in the hands of hunters and people protecting their families and homes — roles where AR-15s were previously considered inappropriate.
No marketing tactic was considered taboo. Gunmakers entered into licensing agreements to get their AR-15s placed in video games like Call of Duty. When I first became a gun magazine editor in 2010, the Freedom Group had just begun running ads promising that men could have their “man cards” reissued if they purchased Bushmaster AR-15s. The most memorable print ad from the campaign noted in fine print, “If it’s good enough for the professional, it’s good enough for you.”
Gunmakers even produced .22-caliber versions of AR-15s, like the Wee1 Tactical JR-15 and Smith & Wesson M&P 15-22, to teach new shooters — especially children — how to use AR-style rifles and interest them in larger-caliber versions. The whole point was to make AR-15s seem fun and inviting. Going even further, the gun industry created shooting matches where competitors must “run and gun” and hit as many targets as they can in seconds — tasks for which AR-15s excel.
Mission accomplished
The marketing paid off, creating a very dedicated following of enthusiasts who, according to the gun industry’s trade group, own nearly four AR-15s on average. While AR-15 owners still represent a fraction of all gun owners in the U.S., their numbers are growing, and more people today see the guns as both a hobby and lifestyle than ever before. And they’re more than that: They’re a symbol. These days, you’ll see AR-15s on bumper stickers, flags at protests, even bags of coffee.
Ignoring the lives that have been lost along the way, the gun industry, driven by cold, hard profit, worked hard to transform the AR-15 from a hunk of plastic and metal into an identity. And it worked.