LVMH is the world’s biggest luxury goods conglomerate. The initials stand for Louis Vuitton, Moët, and Hennessey. The cofounder, Bernard Arnault, trades back and forth with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the world. The company owns 75 brands, comprising most of the luxury brands you’ve heard of across apparel, cosmetics, accessories, and liquor. The list includes the ones above plus Christian Dior, Dom Pérignon, Marc Jacobs, Fendi, TAG Heuer, Bulgari, Tiffany & Co., Sephora, and many others.
The list does not include any gun companies. But why not? There are plenty of luxury gun companies. Legendary custom gunmakers like James Purdey & Sons come to mind. From 1989 to 2021, Holland & Holland was even owned by Chanel. Yes, that Chanel. Thanks to @Deichgraf on our Discord for that fun fact.
@wyvern on our Discord points out that Griffin & Howe was upstairs at the Abercrombie & Fitch store in Manhattan, back when the latter was an upscale outdoors outfitter. There’s a corroborating anecdote from Lillian Ross’s electric 1950 profile of Ernest Hemingway for The New Yorker. Hemingway is shopping at the Abercrombie store on Fifth Avenue and runs into a friend, who (from Wikipedia) was “an Anglo-American polo champion and a member of the Guest family of Britain”:
“Wolfie!” [Hemingway] shouted at a man who seemed almost seven feet tall and whose back was to us.
The man turned around. He had a big, square red face, and at the sight of Hemingway it registered extreme joy. “Papa!” he shouted.
The big man and Hemingway embraced and pounded each other on the back for quite some time. It was Winston Guest. Mr. Guest told us he was going upstairs to pick up a gun and proposed that we come along. Hemingway asked what kind of gun, and Guest said a ten-gauge magnum.
“Beautiful gun,” Hemingway said, taking his bedroom slippers from the clerk and stuffing them into his pocket.
So it’s not that guns can’t in principle be luxury goods. Whether they are luxury goods in practice comes down to whether elites think guns are cool.
There are two tailwinds playing out on that right now.
The first is despite all the issues with deplatforming, guns have a structural advantage on social media. Guns win anytime that people can spread knowledge:
A little while ago, Santiago Pliego made this observation:
“What smart people are supposed to think” dictates a lot of what’s acceptable. In “elite” circles, it defines what is normalized vs. what is stigmatized. So if you’re interested in normalizing (or stigmatizing) guns, then you need to pay attention to what smart people are told they’re supposed to think.
There are two ways to think of gun research. The first is what you think of when you think of research. Have a hypothesis, go learn and measure, and then see if you were right or wrong. The second is preference laundering. Take a preexisting belief and launder it into science.
The power of preference laundering is that it turns personal beliefs into the “official” answer for what smart people are supposed to think. It's hard to run “I think guns are bad” as straight news in the NYT. But it’s easy to run “Scientists say guns are harmful”. People are busy and don't have time to look at the details of gun nerd stuff. They know they’re busy and lack context on details, so they’re smart enough to not take some random political opinion as fact. Preference laundering is a hack around that defense, because it presents as expert consensus, not political opinion.
Pre-internet, the pro-gun-control view could be preference laundered undetectably through the small handful of media outlets that people got their news from. The big three networks, the major newspapers, and a handful of magazines. After a few decades of that, the gun control catechesis of the elites was complete. It was no longer acceptable to publicly value gun rights. Lip service to hunting, sporting, and some limited self-defense applications was fine, but “widespread ownership of weapons qua weapons is good actually” was outside the Overton window.
A preference laundering machine is powerful, but it’s also fragile. Because it hinges on monopolizing “this is what smart people are supposed to think”, it’s vulnerable to any hint that it is in fact built on a foundation of basic mistakes — it’s embarrassing to be seen believing something that’s been poked full of holes. But for decades, there was no scalable way to poke holes in core fallacies.
Today the internet pokes holes instantly for anyone to see.
The second tailwind is that the traction guns get on social media incentivizes non-gun-related brands to dip their toes in the water. See 2023’s collaboration between Mystery Ranch and Dior (an LVMH brand!) on a $4000 backpack:
On some level, yes, silly. They wrote “Dior” on some Mystery Ranch gear, made the zipper pulls shiny, and 15x’ed the price.
But beyond the surface silliness, there’s something to learn here about how products gain mainstream acceptance.
Imagine a spectrum:
On the left end, you have a pure fungible commodity, where price is exclusively a function of the quantity you’re buying. Dollar bills, say, or barrels of crude oil.
On the right end of the spectrum, you have a Platonic Veblen good, where price/value derive purely from the cachet of the good’s high price.
In the middle, you have goods whose price is based partially on functional characteristics and partially on more qualitative factors, shifting increasingly to the latter as you move right on the spectrum.
You can map gun stuff onto this spectrum. Ammo isn’t quite at the left extreme of the spectrum, but if you filter down to certain ammo subcategories (“no-reman 124 gr brass 9mm FMJs), it’s pretty close to the left end. ARs are somewhere in the middle — you’ve got your workaday brands, or you can move right on the spectrum and get deep into diminishing-marginal-returns-on-functionality with KACs and LMTs and the like. And on the right of the spectrum you’ve got stuff like a custom pair of Holland & Holland shotguns, which will be no more reliable than a Browning that costs 98% less but which do come with cool engravings and a British man in a bespoke suit who’ll serve you champagne during the fitting appointments.
What this spectrum describes, as you move towards the right, is a process of persuading people that there’s something valuable about your product other than its raw materials (in the case of a fungible commodity like crude oil) or its purely functional aspects (in the case of a product on the second-to-leftmost notch on the spectrum, like ammo).
There’s a word for expanding the definition of your product’s value beyond just the cost of its raw material inputs: branding. You probably don’t know the make of the 2x4s in your wall or the asphalt in your driveway. (Although knowing the readership of this newsletter, who knows, you probably do.) But everyone knows the make of their car or their phone.
Moving to the right on the spectrum means that people are starting to care about what your product represents. The qualitative aspects. The bigger the customer base and the more they pay, the more they care.
It’s fine to laugh about the Mystery Ranch x Dior collab, because hey, it’s funny and chaotic-neutral. Is it progress? Who knows. But it is the sort of thing that will inevitably accompany progress. So the more that gun stuff gains cultural acceptance, the more of this sort of thing you’ll see. Enjoy it as a good omen.
These things aren’t won and lost with a single post or a single collab. But it’s nice seeing the data points stack up.
Simply put even more shocking than the ineffectiveness of the veteran Afghan Insurgency’s attacks with gunfire, is the terrifying effectiveness amateur and deranged North Americans seem to muster consistently against both the public and the police forces who have spent decades training and preparing for such events.
While civilians with concealed handgun permits stopped 51.5% of the active shootings in non-gun-free zones, police stopped 44.6% of the cases. Interestingly, police officers were much more likely to lose their lives or be wounded in stopping these attacks than armed civilians. Twenty-seven officers were killed in 19 attacks. That is 5.94 times the rate that permit holders were killed.
…
[T]he rate of police shooting the wrong person is very low, though it is slightly more than twice the rate that civilians shoot a bystander (1.14% versus 0.56%). The police accidentally shot other police officers at very slightly higher than the rate that civilians shot bystanders.
Let's be clear, guns are already luxury goods for much of the enthusiast market. The overwhelming majority of people who own more than a few guns aren't buying them because they're using them to carry, train, or hunt.
They're buying them for luxury reasons: mechanical interest, showing off, collecting, and participating in owners groups. With social media its never been easier to flaunt your cool gun without ever taking it to the range or find a hobby community with a specific interest area.
Companies are figuring this out. Beretta lists 20(!) different 92 SKUs on their website and limited run distributor exclusive color ways are becoming the norm.
Let's be clear, guns are already luxury goods for much of the enthusiast market. The overwhelming majority of people who own more than a few guns aren't buying them because they're using them to carry, train, or hunt.
They're buying them for luxury reasons: mechanical interest, showing off, collecting, and participating in owners groups. With social media its never been easier to flaunt your cool gun without ever taking it to the range or find a hobby community with a specific interest area.
Companies are figuring this out. Beretta lists 20(!) different 92 SKUs on their website and limited run distributor exclusive color ways are becoming the norm.
Wait a sec.... "Hennessey" as in "I don't go to that bar, they serve Hennessey"?