It is an odd fact of life that gun shop owners and dealers at shows (even more) tend to not feel some of the pressure of more -- how to say? -- mainstream salesmen to make the customer feel welcomed and appreciated.
When a dealer starts speaking of not wanting people to touch "his" guns, it shows a very stilted perspective that I don't see from other retailers.
One way of looking at gun sales would be, "The more guns I get into more sets of hands, the more sales I'll make and the more product I'll move." In other words, you gotta swing if you want to hit the ball.
The other seems to be, "People should have to earn the right to handle my wares. If they don't look the way I like, talk the way I like, don't look like they've got the money, or seem to be price-shopping, they ain't touchin' MY guns. And they'll get the message pretty darned quick that I don't want their type in my store!" And, to be fair, a lot of these guys have been in business for decades. 'The customer is always wrong' must be a valid business model for them
Now, if the appliance store treated their refrigerators and high-end ranges that way, we'd all applaud as they went right out of business. But gun shops have a certain odd hold on us. We almost expect a real gun dealer to be a crusty old jerk who is extremely annoyed to be bothered with our inquiries. Pat McManus' character Henry P. Grogan fondly immortalizes the type. Becoming a customer -- bearding the lion in its den, so to speak -- is (or was) a distinct rite of passage for most of us.
The odd thing is that gun sales are through the roof, even in a bad economy. Someone is selling them. Maybe hundreds of thousands of new buyers are learning to appreciate the hazing ritual of buying a gun from the traditional old coot. Or, perhaps, there's a certain class of dealer that is learning to say, "yes ma'am, no sir, and I'll be VERY glad to help with that!"
As W.C. Fields once said, "Ahhh, the good old days. I hope they never come again."
