Alec MacGillis at The New Republic had a stroke of genius when he decided to pull the last quarterly SEC filing for The Freedom Group. That’s the consolidated group of gun manufacturers aggregated together and now owned by Cerberus Capital Management, of the country’s biggest and most successful private equity firms. How do they look at their own financial prospects, going into the future?
Well, it makes for some entertaining if sometimes macabre and occasionally gross reading. You’ve got fairly candid discussions of male insecurity as a decent on-going growth opportunity, women as a new source of gun purchases and a general migration from hunting and target shooting toward gun ownership as a way of simply feeling more awesome.
The part that got me though was the prospects of the 2012 election.
As the filing put it, “We believe the continued economic uncertainty and the 2012 presidential election is likely to continue to spur handgun and certain rifle sales.”
I can’t help but wonder whether there wasn’t some financial type who, on writing that, didn’t think, okay, this is kind of fucked up. Should we be concerned that the presidential campaign is driving handgun and rifle sales?
I guess not.
Cerberus has announced plans to divest itself of all ownership of Freedom Group.
