A Gun Nut Weekend

Yosemite Sam and I were busy enjoying our gun-nuttiness to its fullest. That also means that we spent more money than we planned. Oh well, such is life. After all, what’s the point of working if you can’t spend the proceeds of that work on something you enjoy?

Friday night, Yosemite Sam and I joined yet another gun club, an Izaak Walton League Chapter here in Maryland. The chapter is also engaged in conservation work, supporting fishing and hunting rights, and other good works. All in all, we believe it’s a good fit. Still a year’s worth of membership and initiation fees does make the pocketbook a bit lighter.

Saturday, we went to the Nation’s Gun Show in Chantilly, VA (thanks to Matt at Armed Canadian for offering to pick stuff up early for us—we saw his comment to this post too late to take him up on it).

Yesterday was cold with a raw wind. We arrived at the Dulles Expo Center around 10:30and faced full parking lots. After parking, we stood outside in line for about 15 minutes with the wind chapping our faces, the concrete chilling our feet. We paid the $12.00 each admission fee and roamed around.

We bought some books, several magazines for our ARs and a semi-auto handgun of mine. We didn’t buy ammo partly because we had recently bought some and because they had few individual boxes. Dealers had good supplies of 1000 round cases of .223, but we’re waiting for pay day and we’ll be in tax-free New Hampshire over Thanksgiving (wink wink.

We saw lots of guns in this huge show. Dealers showed $25,000 muskets, and $25,000 Thompson submachine guns (not the same dealers). Disturbingly, there was no beef jerky. Sad, but true. Ammo dealers and black rifle dealers were doing a brisk business.

We saw media camera crews interviewing dealers and customers. I hope they don’t focus on militaria vendors with their German helmets and swastikas, but that’s probably too much to hope for. We witnessed the humanity that you see at guns shows; ordinary people who simply like to shoot and go to a gun show for wide selections of guns, gear, and accessories all at 15% included.

In short, we came home poorer, tired, and today I am reading about the competitive AR-15, one of the books I bought at the show.