7. Rifles by mail was a Sears product line for decades
Well into the 1970s the Sears catalog featured an extensive line of rifles, shotguns, and scopes, from leading manufacturers which included Remington, Winchester, Marlin, Browning, and others. Sears also offered their own brand of long guns endorsed by former baseball star and noted outdoorsman Ted Williams. The Ted Williams brand extended to other outdoor and sporting equipment sold by Sears, including fishing and camping gear, other hunting equipment, outdoor clothes, duck blinds, canoes, fishing boats, sleeping bags, and more. Sears offered their weapons for sale both in stores and in their catalogs, which by the 1960s were called their annual Wish Books.
Sears was certainly not alone in the marketing and sale of rifles and shotguns via their catalogs. Competitor Montgomery Ward also sold weapons from leading manufacturers as well as marketing their its line under the brand name Western Fields. Both retailers advertised their gun product lines in other publications besides their respective catalogs. An advertisement in Boys’ Life – the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America at the time – in the 1960s ran which proclaimed a gun for every member of the family, including an air-powered BB gun for the youngest, and a Ted Williams shotgun for Dad. Catalog sales of guns by Sears, Montgomery Ward. J. C. Penney’s and others continued until the late 1980s, when the retailers bowed to increased public pressure for the sales to stop.