With an executive order this week, President Obama is seeking to require background checks on most gun sales. Until now, the checks haven't been required for sales by small vendors. This is sometimes referred to as the “gun show loophole.”
Paul Snider has been a gun show promoter for more than three decades. He’s got a showat Expo Idaho on the Ada County Fairgrounds this weekend. Snider thinks Obama’s executive order could mean the end of small gun shows. He says larger shows like his will take a financial hit, but continue.
Snider is pretty sure how requiring all his vendors to do background checks will impact his business. He says that’s because the state of Washington passed a measure that did that very thing.
“And that started January 1, 2015,” Snider says. “And it hit us pretty hard. It hit me in Washington about 30 to 35 percent.”
Snider says Washington’s new law scared some buyers away but also some of the small gun vendors left the business because they didn’t want to do the background checks.
Snider says most of the vendors he works with are full-time dealers and already run checks at shows. But he says about 20 percent of his vendors sell guns more as a hobby than a business. He thinks the president's action will lead many of them to stop selling altogether. Snider says that’s not because performing the checks is difficult, but because those vendors believe the government wants to ultimately create a registry of all guns in America.
“The people I deal with, the majority of them, they are fearful that a register of guns someday, with the wrong president… that they could confiscate all guns,” Snider says.
Find Adam Cotterell on Twitter @cotterelladam
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