Bourjaily: Two Shotguns Equal One Bow?

So I walked into the local sporting goods store a few weeks ago, not really thinking that I needed a Benelli, but there in the rack was a brand new black M2, marked as used. It was pristine, and the asking price was so low I figured if nothing else I could immediately sell it and make money. Right next to it was a next-to-new Legacy, one of Benelli’s higher grade models, also very – by Benelli standards – reasonably priced.

I asked the kid at the counter about the two guns.

“They’ve been test-fired only. Some guy traded them both yesterday in on a new Mathews bow.”

It turns out the bow was fully set up, with arrows and sights and releases and quivers, and the guy got some other gear, too, but still, since when does one bow equal two guns? The kicker is, two or three years from now, the archery manufacturers will convince the guy that traded in his Benellis that his bow is now obsolete, and he’ll want to swap it for a new one.

It’s not as if deer release a newer, faster version of themselves every couple of years. It seems like the bow that killed a deer in, say, 2005, could probably kill one today or even next year. If gunmakers could figure out how to trick us into trading for new guns every couple of seasons the way the archery manufacturers do, the firearms industry would be in a lot better shape today.

Someone please explain this phenomenon to me.

By the way, I bought the M2 and left the Legacy for someone else to luck into.