First off,
everybody needs to have a business!
There are just so many things that a business is useful for. (Such as, making money...
) And when you have a business, you can deduct all sorts of expenses that are part of the business.
If your business involves something that might reasonably require protection (say, jewelry), then a gun is probably a reasonable business expense.
Sam Adams, you wouldn't normally have to tell the .gov all that stuff about your weapons. You don't fill in a blank with "
I BOUGHT A GUN FOR $1200!!". You'd probably just include it under "Misc expenses," and, unless they had some reason to audit you, that would be the end of it. It you were audited, they'd probably want to see the cancelled check, and they'd probably want you explain why you need a gun in your course of business.
Training you'd list under, "Training expenses." Ammo I would think would reasonably be "Supplies." Etc. They would only be an issue if you were audited, and the auditor decided that the expenses weren't real business expenses.
(On the second thought, $1,200 might be a bit much for an expense--that's getting into the range where you really ought to capitalize it, and depreciate it over the course of the appropriate number of years. My former CPA, who had previously been with the IRS, told me that it's considered normal for a business to expense what would normally be capital items when they were less than a specified dollar value. He said that $500 was typical of many companies, but thought that $1,000 would make sense for me (Big companies like to capitalize things because that improves the bottom line on the published financials; I didn't care about that, and preferred to expense things in the year in which I received the income that was spent on the item.). I don't know how far you can push that line before the IRS will balk.)