Gun control measures centre on ‘black rifles’

They are called “modern sporting rifles” in investor presentations and industry publications. Among enthusiasts they are often known simply as “black rifles”.

One such semi-automatic rifle, the Bushmaster .223, was used to kill 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut. These weapons are now the focus of renewed attempts to impose tighter controls on gun ownership in the US.

They are also among the fastest-growing product lines for US gunmakers.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the US rifle industry had a problem. Hunting, a traditional core market, was in long-term decline, as the country became more urban and suburban.

The number of hunters fell from 16.6m in 1975 to 12.5m in 2006, according to the US Fish & Wildlife Service.

The answer was for gunmakers to attract a new generation of customers with modern sporting rifles: guns that looked not like their fathers’ old bolt-action rifles, but like the latest military assault weapons.

As the chief executive of Smith & Wesson, one of the largest manufacturers of the new style of rifle, put it to investors in September, there is an important market in younger customers who are “coming of age, very interested in firearms, [and] grew up playing video games”.

Machismo is an important part of the marketing. Bushmaster has been running adverts in men’s magazines saying that owning their guns was a way to earn your “man card”.

In a 2010 survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry group, 99 per cent of owners were men.

Modern sporting rifles look like combat rifles because that is what they were designed as. Most of the ones sold in the US are based on the AR-15 design, developed by Armalite for the US Army in the 1950s and now produced by many different manufacturers. There is a vigorous culture of blogs and talkboards, including www.ar15.com, “home of the black rifle”, where enthusiasts discuss equipment and swap tips.

Adapted to to be capable of fully automatic fire, it became the M16, which is still, with further modifications, the standard US infantry weapon.

It is also similar to ArmaLite’s AR-18, which became notorious in Britain as the favoured weapon of the Provisional IRA.

Owners generally like to accessorise their guns, spending hundreds of dollars on extras such as sights, scopes, lights and grips.

Like other fashionable guns such as the Glock pistol, the AR-15 has also become part of gangster rap culture, namechecked in songs by Tupac Shakur, 50 Cent and Lil Wayne.

The results have been spectacularly successful. Freedom Group, the owner of Bushmaster rifles, said in its most recent annual report: “The continued adoption of the modern sporting rifle has led to increased growth in the long-gun market, especially with a younger demographic of users and those who like to customise or upgrade their firearms.”

Freedom estimated that while total sales of long guns to US consumers rose at an annual rate of just 3 per cent during 2007-11, modern sporting rifles grew at an annual rate of 27 per cent.

That growth has accelerated this year. Smith & Wesson reported its sales of modern sporting rifles had more than doubled in the six months to October compared with the equivalent period of 2011.

The number of hunters rebounded to 13.7m in 2011. But the NSSF survey found that hunting was not the principal reason why people owned these guns. Target shooting and “home defence” were the most popular reasons, with big game hunting a distant sixth.

Supporters and opponents differ over whether the guns are even suitable for hunting. A US Treasury report in 1998 concluded that semi-automatic rifles with large magazines were “not generally recognised as particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes”.

The NSSF, however, argues that they “not only can be used for, indeed are exceptionally well suited to, many types of hunting, precision target shooting as well as personal protection.”

Although not fully automatic, AR-15s are capable of rapid fire, and large magazines holding 30, 50 or even 100 rounds reduce the need to stop and reload.

As a commenter on an online customer forum for Walmart, the retail chain which is one of the largest sellers of these rifles, put it, they fire “as fast as you can pull the trigger”.

Almost a third of the owners in the NSSF survey said they used magazines holding 30 or more rounds.

The US “assault weapons” law that lasted from 1994 to 2004, banning sales of large-capacity magazines and some specified models of semi-automatic rifle, had large loopholes that allowed manufacturers to escape its restraints, but is believed by its supporters to have had some effect on the availability of these guns.

Their increased popularity today means the political difficulty of reinstating a similar ban may be even greater now than it was then.