The Guns of Las Vegas

“Are you in town for the gun show?” she said. It was a well-educated guess. My companion at the bar looked like he belonged to SEAL Team Six. Which he had, once upon a time.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “And how could you tell?”

“Lucky guess,” she said and smiled.

My companion was attending “the gun show” because he had, in his retirement, started a company that made add-on accessories for tactical shotguns. So he was here on business. And business is, undeniably, booming.

At the 38th annual SHOT (Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade) Show, some 1,600 vendors would be exhibiting their products across 13 acres of the Sands Expo Center. At least 64,000 possible buyers would be here to look over the exhibits to see what is new in the universe of which firearms are the gravitational center. It is the fifth largest of the trade shows that take place in Las Vegas, in the same league as the Consumer Electronics Show, which is, in some abstract sense, a rival. Thousands upon thousands of American boys who would have once cared intensely about guns are now obsessively doing their shooting via computer games.

“I like this show,” the bartender said, nodding out at the room where the tables were occupied by men who were unmistakably in town for SHOT Show. They didn’t look menacing or dangerous. They just looked like the kind of men who would care about, and know about, guns.

But it was still a full day before the doors opened and the people who had passes would be allowed in to cruise the booths and the displays and to talk guns and the accessories that go with, and enhance, them. So like a lot of the other early arrivals, my companion and I were out on the town, enjoying the ersatz pleasures of Venice .  .  . er, Vegas.

But only in moderation (an alien concept in Las Vegas), because we were due to drive an hour or so out into the desert in the early morning. There was some shooting scheduled. Wilcox Industries had set up a range where invited guests could shoot at targets 600 meters or more downrange using rifles like the one Bradley Cooper, playing Chris Kyle, shot in the movie American Sniper. My companion wasn’t especially interested in the shooting .  .  . he’d done plenty of that in circumstances a lot less sanitized than the range where we would be going. He was there to do a little networking. So while he did business, I observed the action.

The rifles were on bench rests. Visitors who wanted to do some shooting could choose from among GAP rifles in .300 Win Mag, .338, and .308 caliber, all mounted with U.S. Optics scopes. The scope on the .308 a visitor was shooting was an ER-25 with the Horus reticle (retail: a bit more than $3,000). Excellent technology, all of it. But the “killer app,” to use another vernacular, was the Wilcox RAPTAR-S, a “fire control system” that uses lasers and a ballistic computer to make possible first-round accuracy at extremely long ranges.

The shooter puts his eye to the reticle and the crosshairs on the target, far downrange. When he pushes a little toggle switch, the laser feeds the range, along with other data to include the temperature, humidity, and altitude, into the computer, which produces a “solution.” The shooter reads this in the display on the RAPTAR-S unit above the scope. The computer already has the “gun data,” the essential ballistics preloaded. The only thing it doesn’t do is make the wind call. Experienced snipers, like the instructor at the table, would know how to make these.

“We’re calling it a full value wind 15 mph at 3 o’clock,” he said to the visitor whose face was on the stock with his eye at the reticle. “That’s dialed in, already, so when you key it in, you’ll get a read on how much you need to hold.”

“Got it.”

“Hold 11.25 mils up and 2.27 mils right on windage,” he said.

“Sounds right,” the instructor said. “Add 1.8 mils right for wind.”

The shooter took a breath, held it, and squeezed.

“Good shot,” the instructor, whose eye was on a spotting scope, said a second or two later.

“All righhht,” the shooter said.

The target he had just hit was 1,000 yards away. You could barely see it with the naked eye.

At other ranges, scattered out in the desert that surrounds Las Vegas, people who had come for the show fired pistols, rifles, and shotguns at targets. This was range day—the fun part of SHOT Show. Though it is an alien and even repellent notion to millions, there is something deeply satisfying about shooting, and shooting well. There were a lot of good, and enthusiastic, shooters at the desert ranges, and they were plainly having a fine time. Which, in the view of a lot of people who don’t like guns, means they are disturbed.

You didn’t hear much political talk at the ranges. It was more loads and ballistics and shot groups and such. But when the show opened at the Sands, and the people with credentials showed up (the public was not allowed in), there was a fair amount of political talk. The standard, all-purpose laugh line was something about how “Barack Obama is the greatest salesman the gun industry has ever had.”

Har, har, har.

And it is true that all the indices are pointing up. More sales and, also, more background checks. Meaning more first-time buyers. The stocks of two major American gun makers—Smith & Wesson and Ruger—have been beating the averages handily for the last five years. According to Reuters, “Since Obama was elected in 2009, mutual funds have raised their stakes to about $510 million from $30 million in the nation’s two largest gun manufacturers with publicly traded shares, Smith & Wesson Corp. and Sturm, Ruger & Co. That means such stocks are now common in retirement and college savings plans.”

But if it is the best of times for the industry, it is also a time that tests nerves. President Obama had recently issued an executive order that was, according to talk you heard around SHOT Show, much tougher, in fact, than the way it was laid out in the press release the administration issued.

“You need to look at what can be turned up in a background check and used to deny a sale to someone,” a man who followed these things told me. “You can be denied based on an accusation of domestic violence. How many of those turn out to be untrue, just a way of lashing out? PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] can get you denied. Who determines if someone is suffering from PTSD? Depression? It is very easy to bend those things.”

There was talk, also, about changes in asset forfeiture laws that deprived local and state police forces the money they needed to “come to the SHOT Show and go shopping.”

And one man I talked with said, “Listen, they crushed the coal industry. What’s to keep them from crushing the gun industry? The Second Amendment? Give me a break.”

But if there was a sort of vague concern in the air, it was easy to ignore given all the distractions. Which consisted mainly, but not exclusively, of guns.

These can be categorized, though not neatly. There were sporting arms. Shotguns and rifles made by companies with names that even people who do not know much about guns would recognize: Browning, Winchester, Remington. Then there were the handguns. All the big boys were here. Sig Sauer, Glock, H&K, Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Beretta. Then there were the “tactical” pieces that consisted mostly of variations on the AR-15 from companies like Rock River. Also, replica guns from companies like Pedersoli, which makes, among many other pieces, muzzle-loading black powder Kentucky long rifles, like the ones that won the Battle of New Orleans and, arguably, the American Revolution. If there is a firearm with even a small following of aficionados, there would be a vendor here who makes and sells replicas. You want an M-1 carbine like the one carried by Tom Sizemore in Saving Private Ryan? Then you could find your way to Booth #16144, where MKS would show you the one they make and sell. Or if you’d like to have a Sharps like the one Tom Selleck carried in Quigley Down Under, visit Shiloh Rifle, at booth 1227.

The array of guns at SHOT Show was, sort of like the town of Las Vegas, overwhelming and over the top and at the same time .  .  . irresistible. But the guns were just the beginning. There is a universe of accessories and add-ons and companion products, which are to guns as tires, oil filters, headlamps, and so forth are to the automobile. There were booths where you could admire the latest in everything from duck decoys to holsters to body armor to lubricants and cleaning tools and on and on.

Consider flashlights. These were, back in the day, dim and unreliable. But cheap. Then came the LED and the aircraft aluminum body and breakthroughs in battery technology so that now you can pay well north of $200 for a flashlight that really lights up the night and is durable and beautiful in the way a coiled snake is. And there are adapter devices that will allow you to attach the flashlight to a rifle or pistol. There were a lot of flashlights on display at SHOT Show. And there was something seductive about them. The quality and the engineering was well-nigh undeniable.

And that, I suppose, is what struck me most forcefully in my time at the show. The people in this business are not, judging by those I spoke with, “gun nuts.” They may like—or even love—guns, but it is not an indiscriminate sort of love. Nor is it lust of the kind for which Las Vegas is notorious. They were, above all, engineers. But engineers of the older sort. Not the kind who write code but who understand tools.

Guns are among the finest expressions of what can be done with tools that cut and shape steel, especially by one person or a small team. With modern computerized machinery, it is possible to make fine guns in limited runs for demanding customers. Not to mention things like flashlights, sound suppressors, scopes, and all the other accessories and add-ons.

My companion and I stopped by the Strider knife booth. The Strider has a following among special operators. The company is owned by veterans who discount their product to active duty military, which is a good thing since they are very expensive, some of them running to more than $500. But even if you didn’t know anything about knives, the material from which they are made, and the techniques for making them, you would recognize, the second you held a Strider, its quality and sheer engineering excellence.

So much of what was on display at SHOT Show was like that, from the sniper rifles out in the desert on range day to the flashlights and other accessories scattered across those 13 acres of displays. And, of course, the guns.

Those complacent and smug antigun people who, if told that President Obama would like to do to guns what his administration has done to coal, would cheer him on, don’t understand that and don’t want to. And that is why people who do know guns return their contempt. You hear politicians like Martin O’Malley talk about how they got a ban on “assault rifles” in place and that no deer hunter was deprived as a result. They don’t, to use the vernacular, get it.

“Assault rifle” is a meaningless term. The nearest translation is “scary-looking gun.” There are a lot of them out there and people want to own them for various reasons. The people who make them and own them are part of a vibrant industry and culture. America needs as much of that, these days, as it can get.

Near the end of my time in Las Vegas, I talked with one of the contacts my SEAL acquaintance had made. He told me that it had been a disappointing show and he had been coming to them for a long time.

“There is a kind of pall hanging over things right now,” he said. “We’re feeling the drip, drip, drip of the administration’s campaign against guns. They say they want ‘reasonable gun control,’ but what keeps slipping out of their mouths is .  .  . Australia.”

Which, as every American gun owner knows, launched a universal gun confiscation not so long ago.

That was a bit of a down note, so to bring my spirits back up, I made one last loop through the various displays, and I stopped at a booth where I saw a familiar logo. It was for Hoppe’s, the company that makes a gun cleaning solvent that I used on my first .22 and still use on my (pre-’64) Winchester Model 70. Never used anything else. Its smell recalls things for me the way the madeleines did for Proust.

A nice young woman was holding down the Hoppe’s display. She told me about the company’s new products and I told her I would be checking them out. But please, I said, don’t stop making the No. 9.

“No,” she assured me, “that will never happen.”

Not, I suppose, as long as there is a robust gun industry and culture in America. How long that will be is

the question.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.