Just out of curiosity...why are guns so expensive...

A gun is a gadget that has to be 99% foolproof and 99.99% reliable. People literally bet their lives on it working. Few other things in society meet this standard.

My local gun shops have been packed with emotional customers. I don't like buying in a seller's market, so I'll wait this one out.

I recently Started making Barrels at a local place "Montana Rifleman". I work a weekend Shift (Three shifts altogether) our crew has 9 guys. We can, in a 12 hour day, produce 333 cut to length, Drilled, Reamed, Rifled, Heated to spec, Lapped. Average Wage is about 12.50 per hour. the hardest part is Lapping, and depending on the customer each barrel can get 50 to 500 laps.

Right Now we are working on a order for a high profile AR company, they are getting 20,000 barrels from us . Some are .22 caliber cromeolly and stainless steel. Some are .30 cal Cromeolly and stainless steel.
This particular order we are not Contouring or chambering, we only have limited machines to do that. so it would take to long for us to get 20,000 barrels chambered and Contoured.

So alot of labor goes into a Firearm, and thats just the Barrel. after One week I had alot more respect for the cost of a Firearm.

http://www.montanarifleman.com/barrelpricing.htm

Guns are expensive primarily because of labor. Think about going to your local McDonalds and getting a burger that is not assembled correctly or is cold when you get it... many employees don't care. As a customer, you think "how hard is it?" Transfer that comparison to firearm manufacture and you can see in part why they are expensive. Not just anyone is willing to work with pride in their job no matter what you pay them.

Guns are expensive primarily because of regulations in restraint of trade. These regulations limit competion that drives down prices by limiting the number of suppliers and retail outlets. If these regulations didn't exist, the supply would expand to meet the demand and prices would drop. Cheap labor and materials are available all over the world. US regs prevent importation of cheap or surplus guns and components. The 1968 GCA was functionally a trade law preventing the importation of inexpensive arms. By and large the NRA and domestic arms makers supported the bill for this very reason.

The other "regulations" that keeps guns expensive are tort laws placing a liability risk on the entire supply chain. But when you compare the materials and costs in a KelTec to a Glock, it's obvious that these costs are over-shadowed by market perceptions of value that determine final cost.

Don't worry; once guns are banned outright they'll be expensive contraband for a while, and then like drugs and bootleg booze and illegal abortions, the quality will rise as the price drops with expanding availabilty, even with the risk of arrest and prosecution.

Part of the cost of owning guns in the future US will be bribes to bureaucrats and their henchmen to be ignored or perhaps 'deputized'.

Many of the reasons for the high prices of firearms seem logical, but why are some companies such as Hi Point able to offer such low priced guns?

Sure their manufacturing costs are less, but they must have similar expenses for liability, litigation etc.

The existence of $150 new pistols implies that the administrative and legal costs can't be very high. Unless most other companies are poorly run or inefficient.

Hi-Point can offer firearms for such a low cost because of two things: Lower manufacturing costs (they build their guns out of plastic and zinc alloys), and sheer economy of scale. Hi-Point ships a lot of product, because almost anyone can afford a Hi-Point. The more product they produce, the lower the cost per unit. Also I'd imagine they don't spend nearly as much money on advertising and R&D for new products as the bigger, more mainstream/expensive names in firearms in the United States.

I would agree with all of the above mentioned factors. In particular, I think the litigation defense and regulatory management costs.

However, there is one other area that I did not see mentioned - the value of the dollar has declined precipitously against other major currencies. Not only is much of the raw material imported for weapons but the components are as well.

And just for comparison sake since weapons are often considered "sin tax" items, i.e., one pays an excise tax for the "costs" associated with the mere presence of of such items. I would compare that gun price increase to the price of cigarettes. Nothing new fangled about making the bloody things but a boatload of ancillary factors have driven the price to amazing levels.

Just to be clear I do not make such an association between ciggies and guns but am using this to illustrate a point.

materal and labor ain't much

Lets see.....

So it costs maybe $5.00 in labor to make a precision rifle barrel, Then $10 dollars worth of steel for the entire rifle .....

Also, it seems to me that designing and manufacturing a firearm, or a rifle scope for that matter is nothing compaired to the costs and skill involved in making something like a hard disk drive or a digital camera which are sold for less than $50.00 retail.

Can you make a hard drive or digital camera in your garage?

I'd therefore conclude that except for such embellishments as fancy wood, etc., just about any fiirearm available to the US consumer can be manufactured for less than $65.00.

Understand why brand name prescription drugs are so expensive without insurance. You'll then understand that guns are relatively inexpensive. Also, it is a supply and demand thing.

So... can anyone tell me why a Mossberg 500 Security can be sold for $250 and the Remington 870P has to be $450?

I'd therefore conclude that except for such embellishments as fancy wood, etc., just about any fiirearm available to the US consumer can be manufactured for less than $65.00.

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if it is like you say, i have to make you a offer that you can not refuse.
you draw up the planes for a Gun, i am talking at least SIG level of accuracy, durability and and relaiability and it should not weight to mutch and that we can sell for, lets say, 80 bucks, we want to make some profit after all.
fancy looks would be a good as well.

once you are done with that, you contact me and i will pay for all the machinery, rental cost and marketing.
we would be going big, we are talking about worldwide sales here!

you do that and i guarantee you, you will be a billionaire by August of '09.

btw, harddisks are easy to build, look at high class graphics card for a comparison to firearms.

There are some bad misconceptions on how much it costs to make parts.
Take a simple hammer for a 10/22. A high end aftermarket hammer costs between 25 and 35 dollars to buy. There is definitely not $30 worth of metal on that hammer, but to have that one hammer built at a decent cost you have to have a minimum of 200 made, for a person to have those hammers made you have to pay for the time of machine work, the tooling, the electricity, and that aint cheap, the design, the human to run it. And you are not just paying for the metal you keep, you are buying the complete sheet used for cutting.
To sell that hammer for 30 dollars you are making about 15 dollars gross profit. Then you have to inspect the part, package it, prep it for shipping or sale on a store front, that takes time and more money.
And that is a simple 2 dimensional cut. How much would it cost YOU to build a complete working firearm from scratch. Pay the federal and state taxes, go to school to learn the tooling and design, buy the equipment, hire someone to help assemble.
When you buy a video game, or DVD, or something similar, that costs almost nothing for the actual product, you are paying for the writers, actors, voices, CG designer.

HiKlem brings up a good point and its one that is an ongoing debate: how to balance supporting stuff that is Made in the USA and thus keeping people employed here in the (gun) manufacturing sector vs getting stuff at a cheap price to better provide for your family's financial future (by saving the difference between import and domestic.)

Myself, I am trying to buy domestic whenever possible. So I'm buying Federal XM193 (American) instead of Prvi Partizan M193 (Serbian) for .223/5.56 needs and CCI/Speer 9mm (American) instead of Wolf 9mm (Russian). Yea I'll pay a little more, but I'm trying to keep money flowing in the good ol' USA.

Do you have specific examples? Which guns went up an average of $600? Your $500 handgun and your $900 rifle certainly haven't.

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Colt 6920 AR-15 rifles in my area went from averaging $1300 before Obama to averaging $2000 after Obama.

Bushmasters seem to have gone from $800 average to about $1300 average, and PS90s have gone from $1200 to about $1500. WASR rifles have gone from about $450 to about $750, and stripped AR lowers have gone from about $129 to about $189.

I would say that it is more of a percentage than a dollar figure. Everything seems to be about 50% more expensive at this point.

Overall, I don't think that firearms are overly priced for what they are. Like any precision machine, they are costly. An electric drill probably uses as many raw materials and can be had for about $39. However, an electric drill is not as precise of a tool as a handgun. The handgun can not have the tollerances that the drill has, and the design of the handgun is far more complex. It is simple to you, because it has already been designed. But try to design your own gun from scratch. Not so simple.

A good comparison would be a 10 ton press. This is also a mechanical device that costs somewhere in the same realm as a firearm. So I guess my point is that high quality, precision tools are always expensive. Firearms, due to high PSI levels and high accuracy/precision demands, have to be manufactured very precisely and with much tighter tollerances than many other items.

if it is like you say, i have to make you a offer that you can not refuse.
you draw up the planes for a Gun, i am talking at least SIG level of accuracy, durability and and relaiability and it should not weight to mutch and that we can sell for, lets say, 80 bucks, we want to make some profit after all.
fancy looks would be a good as well.

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Pulse, I did not say that I could make any firearm for $65.00.
The $65.00/ unit figure is my rough guess at what it would cost an established, efficient manufacturer Who has already recouped R&D and tooling costs.

How much do you think it costs Glock to make one of their pistols?

Fact: crude oil can be and is extracted from the ground for less than $10.00/BBL. -just not necessarily your well or mine. A few months ago, Crude sold for more than $140.00 BBL.

Thank the majority of the cost rise on Obama, some on the speculators who raise prices hoping you will continue to buy at the higher price, some on us the buyer who ran out and tried to buy up all the guns, and some on the manufacturer who increased his production to meet the higher demand. There is a downside, what happens when everybody that wants a gun has a gun. there will be a big spike in unemployment. We won't need: The 3 shifts at the gun manufacturer, extra clerks at the gun stores, the extra 18 wheelers to haul the guns and ammo, and it goes on and on. Thank the new president.

Gee, I forgot to make my main comment: We see a price raise across the board for guns but not like you mention. The gun show the 20-21 of Dec here in West Palm did show a rise in cost from, going cost, what the buyer is willing to pay, to close to MSRP on the new guns. At the Nov show a Springfield XD40 SC sold on the average for $440 -$465 in Dec they were selling for $460 to $490 and some higher. One KelTec dealer was selling P32 P3AT's for $195 -$215 about $80 under the MSRP. It also appeared to me that the assult style weapons dealers were trying to dump their enventory by negoiating better(lower) prices. I think in fear of AWB when Obama gets in office. I did not see any ammo that was overpriced, some vendors were cheaper than Wal Mart on WBW target ammo.

How much do you think it costs Glock to make one of their pistols?

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well, just some guesstimation

100x1kg of ordnance grade steel, cut down to fit the CNC machines and the forgeries: ~400usd

i think, with all the milling done, it is fair to say that for a single glock, even with the poly frame, glock needs 1kg of steel.

cold hammer forged barrel costs you about ~25usd

mill and surface treat all parts and refinish them, mold the poly parts and assembly of the Pistol : ~50usd

now we go in to the QC, make sure that it properly assembled, testfire it, clean it and pack it up with the mag and a manual: ~50usd

so, my guess that is that a Glock leaves the factory in Austria at ~165usd worth of material and labor.

that is before: transportation/shiping, marketing, Taxes, legal expense insurance, reinvestment in R&D and finaly, the provisions for the 5 or so diffrent companys that handel the product on the way from the factory to the enduser.

So... can anyone tell me why a Mossberg 500 Security can be sold for $250 and the Remington 870P has to be $450?

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500 Security
Aluminum receiver
loose fit
cast barrels
screwed in mag tube
IIRC, plastic trigger group

870P
Steel receiver
Forged, one piece barrel
Brazed in mag tube
metal trigger group

Very few people in this thread seem to have any clue about manufacturing or machining. I've worked in manufacturing for most of the last ten years, with 6 or so of them spent in machine shops. I currently run CNC mills and can program them if necessary. Good steel isn't cheap, and neither are endmills or inserted tooling. Machining from investment castings reduces costs quite a bit. Machining from forgings costs more. Machining from bar stock costs even more. A cheap CNC production mill is going to be in the $250,000+ range(my current full time employer just spent $800K on one machine and $1.1 million on another--and that doesn't include toolholders, the tool presetter, or anything else). Someone to run it will be anywhere from $12/hr to $25/hr. NC programmers will be in the same pay rate bracket. A CAD/CAM package like Mastercam costs several thousand dollars a year to keep up to date. Machines have to be maintained. Fixtures have to be made, reworked, and replaced. Big machines use lots of electricity. Coolant must be maintained and occasionally changed.

Pulse, I did not say that I could make any firearm for $65.00.
The $65.00/ unit figure is my rough guess at what it would cost an established, efficient manufacturer Who has already recouped R&D and tooling costs

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.

Get to it then. I will guarantee that you'll have more than that just in steel(between raw stock, batch testing, heat treating, and various other things), with close to as much in labor/machine time.

Don't take my word for it though, go open a shop and do it. You could get rich in a hurry if you could actually pull it off.

Thanks! I also like the feel of my Remington so much better than the Mossy. The Rem action just seem so much smoother.

Lets see.....

So it costs maybe $5.00 in labor to make a precision rifle barrel, Then $10 dollars worth of steel for the entire rifle .....

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Don't have a clue about metallurgy and machining, do you. Let alone business managment and economics.

The steel used for a rifle barrel is not the same grade as the 3/4" x 24" chunk of round stock you pick up at the local hardware store (which, by the way, a piece of weldable steel as described will run you more than $20 today).

And that $10 worth of labor paid the guy running the CNC milling machine for that one piece is only part of the cost. The machine itself could easily be a half million dollar unit.

So say a small firearms manufacturer moves 1000 units a month. That manufacturer has a 10,000 SF building that costs them $8,000 a month in rent. They employ maybe 30 people, including those who handle the managerial and logistical aspects of the company. With a moderate average wage of, say, $40,000/year per employee with a few benefits. that's around $110,000/ month in wages and benefits. They have maybe $2 million in equipment, perhaps on a 10 year pay-off. That's probably $20,000/month with interest. Utility costs to run the equipment is probably another $1k/month. They have insurance costs that are probably another couple grand. Then say raw materials for those 1,000 units costs them another $80,000. Figure another $5,000 for other miscelleneous expenses.

So lets do the math here

$8k rent
$110k wages
$20k equipment payments
$1k utilities
$2k insurace
$80k materials
$5k misc.

That's $226 per gun, just to manufacture. Now figure in advertising, taxes, licenses, shipping, etc, etc. Probably closer to $250 per unit. That unit is then sold to distributors with enough of a markup for the business to be profitable, say $300 per unit. The distributor then tacks on $50 each for dealer price, plus $20 in shipping. Then the dealer marks the gun up 20% for retail. You now have the final retail price at , say, $449.

Now I pulled all these numbers out of thin air, but with a decent understanding of what it costs to run a business and how much equipment and supplies cost.

That $450 gun nets a profit for the manufacturer of about a half million dollars per year (which is maybe split between 2-4 owners) and pays 30 people $40,000/year. Not astronomical numbers, by any stretch. Certainly not the kind of money big wigs are making in the world of electronics you used for comparison.

A manufacturing company can very easily have overhead, materials and wage expenses that gobble up 70% or more of the gross income.

Also, it seems to me that designing and manufacturing a firearm, or a rifle scope for that matter is nothing compaired to the costs and skill involved in making something like a hard disk drive or a digital camera which are sold for less than $50.00 retail.

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All the digital toys you have are produced by a combination of simple robotics and low cost assembly line labor done overseas. Parts are molded with pennies worth of material, and done by the millions. Do you know how little it costs to manufacture a processor? And if guns were built to the same quality standards as tech gadgets and computers are, people would be maimed and killed every day from component failures.

Even with the high tech, precision equipment used to produce modern firearms, you still have skilled workers doing fitting, assembly and finish work. Then you have people inspecting and testing each and every unit before it leaves the factory.

Firearms are in a very different league from virtually all other commodities. The quality of even the cheapest gun surpasses that of most other goods on the market today.

Well said, Mach IV.

If anything for the police or military worked as well as modern cars, computers, or other accoutrements of life, we would be in bad shape.

Firearms, radios, even our flashlights have to work 100% of the time. We have neither the time nor the luxury of "defragging" firearms, or taking it in for warranty repairs on a steering column leak, or viruses, or simple glitches requiring the almighty CTRL+ALT+DEL.

There is definitely something wrong with gun prices. I don't know what's causing all of it. Some of it is government sticking it's nose in other people's business. But not all of it.

When you can buy an AK47 in africa for something like 35 bucks american, you know there is something fishy going on in america's gun markets.

Well... $35 relatively to an African is akin to a few thousand to us because their daily wage is $0.50 or so, right?