SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) — One local gun shop owner says firearm sales have risen around 40 percent at his store in the last few weeks.
Gun shop Intimidator Sports has been the beneficiary of the rise. Shop owner Tim Nelson says new buyers are a major reason for the increase.
“A lot of new buyers,” Nelson said. “First guns. A lot of new buyers that have decided they want a firearm before New York says that they don’t want you to have one.”
The rise comes after Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a new legislative package that raised the age to buy a semi-automatic rifle from 18 to 21. The bill has meant that semi-automatic rifles are flying off the shelves before the legislation goes into affect later this year.
“Right now semi-automatic rifles are the number 1 seller,” Nelson said. “It doesn’t matter what caliber it is, what it looks like, it’s the semi-automatic rifles right now.”
Meanwhile across the country, marchers took to the streets to attempt to make sales like these go down.
The March for our Lives took place all across the nation this past weekend in places like Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and New York City.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams told CNN that the bill Hochul signed last week was a good start, and asked for more.
“It is unbelievable that we are afraid to ban AK-47s,” Adams told CNN. “You don’t need an AK-47 to shoot a rabbit. We don’t need the level of guns we have in our city.”
Nelson disagrees. He said the issue isn’t with the guns.
“Why are we blaming the gun?” Nelson said. “We don’t blame any other manufacturer for any other thing that happens, except it’s easy to blame a gun or a gun owner, or gun manufacturers.”
While the sales remain high now, further regulations on gun sales could be coming both from the state, and from Washington A group of 10 Democratic and 10 Republican senators reached an agreement on new legislation this past weekend, according to The Washington Post.