Published on Aug 06, 2026
Gun industry giants are allegedly using “minimum advertised price” (MAP) policies to keep firearm prices artificially high, in a potential violation of antitrust law, a new report from a gun control advocacy group argues. Large retailers and manufacturers have used MAPs, which set a minimum price at which retailers can advertise their products, to effectively […]
Gun industry giants are allegedly using “minimum advertised price” (MAP) policies to keep firearm prices artificially high, in a potential violation of antitrust law, a new report from a gun control advocacy group argues.
Large retailers and manufacturers have used MAPs, which set a minimum price at which retailers can advertise their products, to effectively impose a price floor across gun markets, according to the report by Guns Down America.
It may seem strange for a gun control group to push for cheaper guns. The report, however, argues that the industry’s allegedly anticompetitive conduct has helped unite manufacturers and retailers against stronger safety measures while giving them more resources to pour into that fight.
MAPs technically restrict just advertised prices, but the industry’s MAPs “have converged with transaction prices in recent years,” according to the report, which contends that the industry reality looks more like vertical price fixing than a mere restriction on advertising.
Bringing antitrust claims against vertical price fixing, also known as resale price maintenance (RPM), has been difficult ever since the Supreme Court in 2007 overturned per se treatment of RPM on the grounds that such arrangements can, in some cases, benefit consumers. RPM remains per se illegal in California and Maryland and faces stricter scrutiny under European antitrust law.
Some plaintiffs have tried to sidestep this hurdle by instead alleging horizontal collusion around the implementation of MAPs. For example, a class-action lawsuit filed last year painted a similar picture of a MAP-driven cartel in the archery industry, with dominant retailers at the center.
Two of the big-box archery retailers that allegedly orchestrated the conspiracy, Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s, are also major firearms dealers. Guns Down America’s investigation suggests that Bass Pro and Cabela’s employees have at times negotiated MAP-related rebates with gun manufacturers to maintain those dealers’ desired profit margins, and monitored competing retailers to ensure MAP compliance, according to findings that Guns Down America shared with The Capitol Forum. Bass Pro Shop and Cabela’s didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Such coordination between manufacturers and retailers on MAP policy, even if it stems from coercion on the part of retailers, would call into question manufacturers’ assertions that they impose MAP policies unilaterally—and potentially pose antitrust risk.
To be sure, the archery complaint includes extensive allegations of coordination between retailers, primarily through a trade organization, that the Guns Down America report doesn’t have. Perhaps owing to this evidentiary gap, the report argues that plaintiffs—from private litigants to state attorneys general—could scrutinize the firearms industry’s practices under a purely vertical theory of harm despite the tricky jurisprudence.
The Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Leegin v. PSKS warned that RPM policies can still hurt competition if they involve three factors: “many competing manufacturers” adopt the agreements; the firms involved have market power; and the policies are driven by a dominant retailer or a group of retailers.
The firearms industry allegedly satisfies all three factors. At least six manufacturers—representing, as of 2023, around 66% of domestically produced handguns—enforce MAP policies, according to the report. Market concentration figures for revolvers and shotguns are particularly high.
And importantly, retailers appear to be the source of the policies, in a reflection of shifting power dynamics in the gun industry, according to Hudson Munoz, executive director of Guns Down America and the author of the report.
“In the 80s and 90s, manufacturers really had considerable power,” Munoz, who consulted antitrust attorneys and former prosecutors for the report, said in an interview. “In the modern era, in no small part because of the Leegin decision that we are critics of, the flow of power shifted, so you have big retailers exerting economic power over manufacturers.”
In what the report describes as the “clearest evidence in the public record” of this pressure, gun manufacturer SIG Sauer implemented a MAP policy in response to feedback from retailers, the company explained in a 2015 webinar. An article about the webinar in Shooting Industry Magazine commented: “a collective voice (in this case, the majority of the 100-plus dealers surveyed by SIG) can compel change.”
SIG Sauer and other manufacturers mentioned in the report didn’t respond to requests for comment.
If manufacturers push back on MAPs, powerful dealers can theoretically retaliate by leveraging their buying power over those manufacturers—conditioning shelf space or even organizing group boycotts with other retailers. Some retailers have described this dynamic publicly, according to quotes highlighted in the report.
“If we find no MAP policy in place, or if we see a certain company’s product is being footballed online, then we’ll stop giving that company’s product retail space exposure and pursue alternatives,” an Arizona gun retailer told Shooting Industry Magazine in 2014. “There are always options out there.”
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