Mayors prepare boycott of gun manufacturers in order to push for gun control

Minnesota Public Radio reports that Mayor R.T. Rybak of Minneapolis has said that he and 60 other mayors are considering boycotts of gun makers who don’t agree to their sweeping list of gun control demands. Taking a page from the Rahm Emanuel playbook, the mayors intend to use their police department purchasing power as leverage.

This is a re-hash of the Clinton Administration threat, spearheaded by then-HUD Secretary and now governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, to do the same with federal agencies. Despite a successful court action by NSSF to counter the threat at the time, the idea was kicked up again in 2010 by disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who suggested that gun makers must cease and desist the sale of ALL semi-automatic firearms to escape this punishment.

Choosing a service sidearm for police agencies is serious business. Law enforcement procurement officers will be less than pleased to learn that their political overseers seem to want them to go back to revolvers in order to make a point in the gun control debate. In Minneapolis, the deputy chief said “ultimately, it is the chiefs decision what gun is going to be authorized for use by the department,” but the city attorney countered by saying “the city can always set reasonable specifications for the purchases it’s making.”

Mayor Rybak said he mentioned the idea to Barack Obama during a recent visit, and “Obama and his staff were delighted by the idea.”

By no coincidence, Obama is visiting Minneapolis on Monday, February 4th, for the first of a lengthy series of campaign-style gun control pep rallies. Perhaps the mayor and the White House plan to try out the idea that very day, telling both the Secret Service and local law enforcement to turn in their semi-automatic pistols and carry only .38 snubnoses for event security.

If so, it’s safe to predict that “delight” is not the response they will receive.

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TwoForFlinching said:

^ thats not good business... Doesn't matter where profits come from, as long as it's profitable.

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TwoForFlinching said:

^ thats not good business... Doesn't matter where profits come from, as long as it's profitable.

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10Seconds said:

Lets do math. If the manufacture's profit on a new glock is $10, and they sell 70,000 of them to NYC over 10 yrs, that is $70,000 per year they would lose. And Business Week estimated in 2011 that Glock makes a whopping 68% profit margin per pistol. At wholesale pricing, that would make that $10 in the example about more like $272, or a loss of $1.9 million per year.

I think that the PR boost from the public to a manufacturer standing up to this oppression should be worth something too, but without knowing what Glock's overall sales are (as they are privately held) its hard to say if this would be a good trade in the business sense.

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