Christmas was a few days away and Solomon Lehnerd was selling more grenade launchers than usual.
It was the first holiday season that his online gun store was selling the components to assemble the holy grail of enhancements for AR-15-style rifles: a 40-millimeter grenade launcher that mounts to the rifle.
Mr. Lehnerd’s shop, Rooftop Defense, thrives on such items as buyers try to recreate historically accurate military rifles, and he profits almost entirely from what has become the new frontier of American gun stores: accessories.
“The accessories are the meat and potatoes of revenue,” Mr. Lehnerd, who is 29 and goes by Sol, said as he surveyed his counter scattered with holiday orders. “It’s not really in guns; guns have almost no margins at all.”
Scopes, suppressors, handgrips and muzzle brakes were once inconspicuous options associated with firearms in the United States, footnotes to the hardware that often makes headlines. But with store workers reporting lower than expected gun sales in an election year — firearms purchases usually spike in fear of new restrictions from incoming administrations — expensive accessories have been “keeping the door open,” as one retailer from coastal Maine said in late December.
Even the best-selling AR-15, which in the last two decades has become known as “America’s rifle,” is owned by so many Americans that it is no longer in such demand. “Everyone’s got them,” one brick-and-mortar retailer in Minnesota said of his sales this summer. A 2021 firearms survey conducted by a Georgetown University professor found that nearly 25 million people had owned an AR-15-style rifle.
Instead, the field of gun modifications and homemade kits has ballooned. More and more people are either building their own guns or outfitting them with accessories that cost far more than the firearms they’re attached to.
“Guns, especially for us, just kind of lure people in,” said Louis Reich, a sales representative who works for a major firearms distributor. At the start of the week Mr. Reich looks at Rooftop Defense’s website, where Mr. Lehnerd’s inventory is updated in real time, to see what’s selling and what’s sold out. It helps him prepare orders to help Mr. Lehnerd restock.
“Accessories are where we make our money,” Mr. Reich said. The production of firearm suppressors, or silencers, some of which can cost more than twice as much as an AR-15-style rifle, skyrocketed by more than 9,000 percent between 2000 to 2021, according to data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Gun enthusiasts, many of whom suffer from what’s known in the hobby as “restless rifle syndrome,” constantly tinker with their firearms, despite the steep cost. Others, known as cloners, are obsessed with replicating military rifles, especially those from the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to exact specifications, and build firearm after firearm. Grenade launchers and suppressors are often required to match the aesthetic of period weapons.
On this, some gun shop owners like Mr. Lehnerd make their living.
“They’re who keep the businesses alive, this gun industry survives on those guys who are the builders and the enthusiasts,” he said.
Gun retailers, particularly those exclusively online, can have wide-ranging inventories. Some higher-end manufacturers cater more to military contracts than to regular consumers. In 2022, there were roughly 78,000 licensed firearms dealers in the United States, according to the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
Mr. Lehnerd’s own journey to selling firearms accessories was an unusual one. His father was a U.S. Airman, and Mr. Lehnerd was born in South Korea, deaf in one ear. He eventually dropped out of high school, even spending about a month homeless in Los Angeles. But a childhood lived abroad on military bases sparked Mr. Lehnerd’s desire to own a gun. Eventually, a physical injury from changing gas meters led him to open Rooftop Defense with his wife, Abbie.
The shop — which takes its name from Mr. Lehnerd’s nickname “Rooftop,” after the Korean Americans who defended their Los Angeles neighborhood from their roofs during the Rodney King riots — is considered by his peers as a standout in the next generation of American gun stores.
He runs the business from a squat warehouse, deep in cow country an hour outside of Little Rock, Ark., with his one other full-time employee, Sam, whose annual bonus in 2023 was a LEGO Star Wars Millenium Falcon and the Mos Eisley Cantina. Ms. Lehnerd still helps part time with shipments and post office runs.
The shop is well organized, with shelves of accessories, firearms and packages stacked among packages of ramen. It looks nothing like the typical American gun store. But its essence matches the spirit of what a large part of the gun community has become in the past decade: an infatuation with perfecting the AR-15 by way of countless modifications.
When Mr. Lehnerd opened in 2020 he sold just seven items. Now he offers around 700. His customers buy gun accessories almost feverishly with little sign of slowing down; January was his best month since he started. He includes in each order a packet of ramen and a preprinted Post-it note. He had to stop writing them by hand a few years ago as business boomed.
“I know this addiction is expensive,” the note reads, “so enjoy a free meal on us.” Customers also receive a copy of the Constitution.
Some guns and accessories are so elusive on the market that they have a name: “unobtainium.” Like a coveted Air Jordan release from Nike, rare and limited-edition accessories create a frenzy and boost sales for store owners who can get their hands on them.
Andrew Wladyka, a manager at A&M Tactical, a brick-and-mortar gun store in Middletown, R.I., makes most of his money from accessories, ammunition and used gun sales, but his store “doesn’t have enough influence” to stock rifles and accessories from one manufacturer: Knight’s Armament Company.
The company, based in Titusville, Fla., sells almost exclusively to the Defense Department and other government agencies, and is the pinnacle of AR-15 unobtainium, Mr. Wladyka said.
But Mr. Lehnerd made inroads with the company after starting a Facebook group for Knight’s rifle owners in 2016. Then he managed to secure a coveted spot as one of their few civilian retailers.
Now customers mob the Rooftop Defense site whenever Mr. Lehnerd mentions a product drop on Discord or Reddit. In January, he sold 400 Knight’s Armament battery caps — small plastic discs that mount onto a rifle sight — in about 90 minutes. So many people tried to order them at once that the website crashed.
“It was literally the epitome of people going crazy over a Barbie item,” he said. “I knew people wanted these but I didn’t know they wanted it that bad.”
The gun industry’s shift to a drop culture more common among sneaker and fashion brands feels like a natural evolution. In an increasingly polarized nation, gun ownership in America has transformed into more of a lifestyle than a hobby or policy position.
“Guns generally have been stagnant but it’s not just the accessories market that’s growing, it’s the clothes, patches and lifestyle items, too,” said Chase Welch, who works for a public relations firm that partners with major firearms companies.
Jordan Levine, a firefighter and former U.S. Marine, runs a small online company called A Better Way 2A from his basement in Seymour, Conn. Unlike Rooftop Defense, which is directed at gun owners preoccupied with tweaking their guns, Mr. Levinson’s customers are combining their interest in firearms with their views on gun rights and civil rights.
“The gear market is saturated and it’s incredibly hard to get a foothold, and I felt the best way to change the gun community for the better was with a lifestyle brand,” he said.
Mr. Levine’s top sellers are stickers and patches geared toward the growing number of firearms users that might traditionally avoid a gun range: women, minority gun owners and those in the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
“I saw gun rights as something everybody should be able to exercise regardless of who you are, and I thought it was BS that certain groups perceived the gun community as unwelcoming to them,” Mr. Levine, 34, said.
Many of his customers often ask how to avoid spending money on tactical and firearms brands that might be seen as bigoted and unwelcoming.
As a firearms instructor, Mr. Levine started giving out stickers that said “gun rights are human rights.” From there it turned into an Etsy page and then A Better Way 2A in 2021.
Now, his basement office is stocked floor to ceiling with stickers like “Make Racists Afraid Again.” Another popular decal has crossed rifles with the tag “Be Queer Shoot Straight.” Gun sales may have cooled around the country, but his stickers and shirts, especially since the election, have taken off.
“My Black Friday sale was insane,” Mr. Levine said.
