Nancy and Craig go to a gun show

Our campground is part of the North Carolina Fairgrounds complex.  While we're here, this weekend, in various venues on site, there will be a horse show, a model train show, a coin and stamp show, and one that holds a lot of interest for us - a guns and knives show. In Savannah Nancy and I had marched in an anti-gun/common sense gun control rally, and that pretty well expresses our opinions on the subject, but we thought it would be interesting to get the flavor of the other point of view.

Admission to the gun show was $9, and ID's were not checked.  In fact, vendors are not required to do background checks or even look at customers' drivers' licenses or other forms of identification before selling people Glocks and AR-15's.  And individuals who want to sell their own firearms, presumably to dealers there, are allowed to bring them in, as long as they are unloaded.

The show was in one of those enormous buildings you see at events like this, and it was extremely well-attended.  The interior seemed to cover about an acre.

Photography was forbidden, so stealth was required to get even a couple of poorly-composed shots.  I pretended to be checking my email, then brought up my phone, clicked, and dropped it back down again.  In reality, nobody seemed to notice or care, but I couldn't help worrying that a guard was going to tackle me, which of course would have been great material for the blog.

What kinds of things could one buy at the show?  Every sort of handgun and rifle imaginable, as you would expect.  AR-15's were for sale at every other table, it seemed.  I found it interesting that the cost of an AR-15 was in the $400-$500 range, and the cost of most handguns was not a great deal lower.  Of course there were also fancier and much more expensive weapons available for the connoisseur.

This was a knife show, too, and we bought an OTF model.  "OTF" stands for "out the front".  Press a rocker button and the blade shoots from the body and locks in place.  Press it again and it retracts out of sight within the body.  If I'm ever forced to defend myself, the other guy better look out.  I do understand that there are some leftist pinko states where the carrying of OTF knives is restricted.  And I understand that they're illegal in Canada, so if we cross the border, we'll have to hide it.  Such desperados.

At the same stand Nancy acquired a rechargeable taser for the closeout price of $5.  We feel safer now.  I briefly considered buying a handgun for protecting us in the unlikely event that someone forced his way into our motorhome at night, but that's so unlikely, and we know that a handgun in the home statistically is more likely to harm a family member than an intruder, that for the sake of Tammy Faye and Sophia, we're going to rely on our knife, our taser, and our common sense for protection.

What else was for sale?  Obviously, all kinds of ammunition and firearm accessories.  T-shirts, signs and bumper stickers, camouflage apparel, flags, and books (The Anarchist Cookbook, The Poor Man's James Bond, Do It Yourself Machine Guns), and other survivalist literature,  And the NRA had a stand there.

It was a fun and unthreatening atmosphere.  Of course it makes absolutely no sense that gun stores are required to do background checks, but gun shows are not.  So anyone who is judged unqualified to purchase a gun, due to assault convictions, jail time, or mental illness, can legally buy multiple assault weapons at a gun show.  Nancy are I are philosophically opposed to gun shows of this type, but today was a lot of fun.


Postscript: Nancy always reads each entry before I post it.  She didn't like the tone of this one, because she thought it made us sound paranoid about our safety.  Fact is, we don't worry about that at all.  Much of the above was tongue-in-cheek.  The reason she wanted to buy the knife was for slitting open packages, she said.  A $60 package opener.  (Also, it was kind of pretty.)  She bought the taser mostly because it cost just five dollars.  And who can resist a bargain?