Last week we interviewed Marc Nemati on our podcast. Marc is the president and CEO of GrabAGun, an online guns-and-accessories retailer with just under $100 million in revenue. On July 16, GrabAGun went public on the New York Stock Exchange.
The list of publicly traded companies in the gun industry is short. There are only a handful on US markets:
Outdoor Holding Company, which was formerly known as AMMO Inc. and is the company that owns Gunbroker
And now GrabAGun
There used to be more. Vista Outdoor spun its ammo companies (including the CCI, Federal, and Remington brands) out into a separate company which was acquired by the Czechoslovak Group and rebranded the remaining outdoors holdings (including major brands like CamelBak, Giro, and Simms) into a company called Revelyst, which was acquired by a group of private investors.
Smith & Wesson did a similar split back in 2020, splitting its sub-brands between a gun-related holding company (currently publicly traded as Smith & Wesson) and a general-outdoors holding company (currently publicly traded as American Outdoor Brands).
Taurus is publicly traded on Brazil’s B3 stock exchange, and Colt CZ Group (which owns the various CZ sub-brands in addition to having purchased Colt in 2022) is publicly traded on the Prague Stock Exchange.
That’s it.
So how should we think about the GrabAGun IPO? At the scale of the entire stock market, it’s a drop in the bucket. But there are knock-on effects. More liquidity opportunities for gun companies mean (a) more startups in the space become viable for investment and (b) more money in the pockets of people who want to invest in the space. And both of those are self-reinforcing if they get some momentum behind them.
We wrote a few years ago about what happens when the centralizing forces keeping the investment out of the gun industry start to break down:
Gamestop stock went thermonuclear a week ago, which is at least a few months in internet time. Plenty of time for the initial themes to have set up already: the internet is good at attacking centralized gatekeeping; platform rules come apart at the seams when those attacks, you know, succeed; it turns out that bad platform rules actually just reflect underlying structures which assumed a level of centralized control that is increasingly incompatible with a free internet; etc.
But this is a newsletter about guns. So as much fun as it would be to analyze /u/DeepFuckingValue and the /r/wallstreetbets army 360 no-scoping a couple hedge funds, you’ve probably read enough about that already. (In case you haven’t: tldr the stock market is a fun MMORPG where you get money for being clever or lucky, but sometimes we all get very surprised by who turns out to be the most clever or lucky, and that’s quite entertaining for all involved, especially for the people who make a lot of money on the surprise, but actually not always very entertaining for the people who lose money on it.) Instead of all that, let’s apply some of the lessons to our niche.
There are only two publicly traded gun companies: Smith & Wesson and Ruger. Both are pretty small in the grand scheme of things, with market caps right around $1 billion. (For a sense of scale, that’s 7x smaller than Under Armour, 99x smaller than Caterpillar, and 1250x smaller than Google.)
(Update as of August 12, 2025, since this excerpt is originally from February 2021: Smith & Wesson’s market cap is now $360 million and Ruger’s is $548 million. Averaged to $454 million, that’s now 425x smaller than Caterpillar and 5430x smaller than Google.)
What’s it like to be a publicly traded gun company? Let’s look at Ruger as an example. BlackRock owns 15.9% of the company. Vanguard owns 10.2%. Renaissance Technologies owns 8%. (Stats here.) So just three major institutional holders own a third of the company. Two of those holders — BlackRock and Vanguard — manage meaningful fractions of the world’s total wealth, with just over $8.5 trillion under management each. Centralization.
Giant investment management companies like that own shares in thousands of companies. Those shares entitle them to vote on board membership and shareholder proposals. But it’s too much work to figure out how to vote your shares in thousands of companies. So there are firms — Institutional Shareholder Services is the biggest one — who advise institutional shareholders on how to vote. If you’re BlackRock, you don’t need to track the minutiae of each shareholder proposal for each rinky-dink $1B company you own 15% of. You just call ISS and say, “Hey, this company’s annual shareholder meeting is coming up, how should we vote?”; ISS says, “There are three board directors and seven shareholder proposals to vote on. Here’s how you should vote on each one”; and you mostly go, “Cool, will do, thanks.” Centralization.
And that is indeed how it works. Back in 2018, ISS recommended that Ruger’s shareholders vote in favor of forcing the company (via a shareholder proposal written by gun control orgs that had bought up a small stake in the company) “to prepare a report about the financial and reputational risks associated with their business.” So the shareholders voted in favor of it. Centralization.
The company wrote a perfunctory report and promptly stuck it in file 13, so the next year, ISS punished the three board members most responsible for the report by recommending that shareholders vote to remove them from the board. Shareholders somewhat voted that way, with those directors only getting reappointed with 72% of the votes, as opposed to ≥97% for the other directors.
This all ties into a favorite theme around this neck of the woods: centralization favors gun control, and decentralization favors gun rights. Careful not to misread that as being about people: people who favor centralization or decentralization have every permutation of opinions on the topic. The point is that decentralized structures naturally push towards gun rights, irrespective of what the people involved want or don’t want.
This stems from a related thing we’ve written about, which is that when people learn about guns, they tend to be fine with them. Not true in every individual case, of course, but that’s the way things gravitate; a person learning about guns is more likely to see their belief in gun rights go up rather than down.
So there’s a corollary to that: gun control requires an environment where people can be prevented from learning about guns. And that requires centralization.
Think about the tech-accelerated decentralization of each of the following: media, content creation, manufacturing methods, commerce, payments, and even government. In every case, decentralization of those channels has been a boon to gun rights, and has been (quite rationally, if you think about their incentives) fought against tooth-and-nail by gun control orgs. Last week served notice that we’ll soon need to add finance to the list of channels.
Gun stuff has always operated under the friction of centralized decision-making in the world of finance. But we just got a taste of what markets can do when they start to route around centralized chokepoints. That trend isn’t slowing down anytime soon. We know it benefits gun rights in a general sense, but the exact shape that’ll take is anyone’s guess. We just know we’re hodl’ing. 🚀
The same ideas still apply. An IPO is centralizing, in the sense that that specific company ends up more scrutinized and more regulated. But it also normalizes the industry, and it creates liquidity to start more startups in the industry. That nets out well for gun rights.
This week’s links
Airman arrested in the fatal shooting of the fellow airman who, it was said, was shot by his holstered Sig M18
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