Justin Fox, Columnist

The Gun-Manufacturing Boom

Industry employment hasn't changed much. But it's churning out product like never before.

July 8, 2016 at 2:34 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Plenty to go around.
Photographer: PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

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On Jobs Day every month, I write a brief column looking at some long-run trend in the data that gets ignored in the excitement over whether nonfarm payroll employment gains beat the consensus or not (and wow, did they in June). With the terrible events of the past week, I wondered whether it made sense to do so today. But, well, there is a somewhat relevant employment category:1467969686251

Employment in the gun-making industry in the U.S. isn't exactly booming. But as the overall manufacturing sector hemorrhaged jobs from 2001 to 2010, gun makers did at least hold employment reasonably steady.