Are guns cheap?
It's hard to tell since we don't really have any regulation of guns and we don't really keep track of guns. We really don't know if guns are getting cheaper or not. A lot of guns are sold on the illegal black market and those guns presumably have a price fluctuation depending on supply and demand. Again since Congress basically restricts information on illegal guns and where they're coming from and the supply patterns, it's hard for us to figure out anything there. You can look to see what the manufacturing costs are and get some ideas as to whether it's costing more to manufacture a product or less to manufacture a product, which usually determines price, but no regulation of the gun industry, we don't know. We're not allowed to sue the gun industry, so we don't get those figures. It's amazing to me that you have this industry that's so totally unregulated and so dangerous. Other industries we have some information on, gun industry we don't. Generally though we assume that the prices are fairly stable. Cheap guns are the sort of things that we're concerned about, the old Saturday Night Specials, if you will. When I talked to police chiefs around the country they say that a lot of the guns that they're seeing from gang-bangers are the fairly new guns, the fairly expensive guns. It's not quite sure what the market is. The one thing that is clear is that people make a lot of money off of guns--the manufacturers do, the distributers do, and the people that are a part of the supply chain.
