How to profit from the massacre of the innocents
- Just as domestic mass killings are almost always good for gun stock investors in the United States, so foreign wars with US military involvement will for sure boost the share prices of American weapons manufacturers
It was premature reporting. “Gun stocks are muted in early trading,” The New York Times filed online on Wednesday. As it turned out, except for the first half-hour, weapons stocks did shoot up for the rest of the trading session. That’s the kind of reaction to be expected in the US stock market in the days after a mass shooting: the more horrendous the killings, the younger the victims, the higher the stocks go.
And so, the same stock pattern was repeated the day after an 18-year-old gunman shot his grandmother then killed 19 children and two teachers before being killed himself by police responders. At the end of the day, the stocks of Smith & Wesson, American Outdoor Brands and Vista Outdoor all jumped almost 7 per cent; Sturm, Ruger & Company more than 4 per cent; Sportsman’s Warehouse 6.5 per cent; and Ammo Inc more than 5.5 per cent.
Why? As The Times explains, “The share prices of gun and ammunition companies often rise after mass shootings, with investors anticipating a spike in sales ahead of calls for stricter gun laws.” That is not the whole story, but still a big part of it. Gun stocks similarly went up after a gunman killed 58 people and wounded more than 400 at a concert in Las Vegas in 2017; likewise, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in which 26 people were killed, most of them young children, in 2012.
The young victims of the Texas school shooting
Given the frequency of mass shootings in the country, it’s an easy way to make a quick buck. Most investment tricks are rendered useless once they have become well-known. But this one is likely to work for a long time, given Americans’ enduring love of high-calibre weapons and extreme tolerance for mass killings, even of young children. In any other country, profiting from such killings, especially of children, would have been frowned upon with a great deal of public disgust; not so in the United States.
America’s high tolerance of gun violence is unique among Western democracies, perhaps around the world. New Zealand introduced swift and sweeping reforms of gun laws less than a month after the mass shooting in Christchurch in 2019, which saw 51 people killed and 50 wounded. The country’s lawmakers voted 119-1 to introduce a nationwide ban on semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles. In Britain, tough gun control laws were successfully pushed through after a gunman murdered 16 students and their teacher at a primary school in Scotland in 1996.
Texas shooting among deadliest school attacks in past 10 years
In the US, though, just as domestic mass killings are almost always good for the gun stock investors, so foreign wars with US military involvement will for sure boost the stocks of major American weapons manufacturers. Since the Russian invasion started in late February, resulting in Washington’s increasing supplies of weapons to Ukraine, Lockheed Martin’s stocks have gone up about 15 per cent while those of Northrop Grumman gained more than 20 per cent. Both are among a handful of elite weapons suppliers to the Pentagon.
This is capitalist ideology at its worst. Just as US overseas military entanglements are usually justified as promoting freedom and democracy abroad, and “liberating” the people being invaded, so the constitutionally protected right to own deadly weapons is defended for the sake of American citizens’ personal freedom, self-reliance, independence and resistance to tyranny such as the US federal government. It’s safe to say there is a good deal of moral, legal and conceptual confusion here, rendered all the more deadly because of many Americans’ idea of – and arrogant insistence on – their peculiar sense of the meaning of freedom.
