SHOT Show: Things That Made Us Say “Huh?”

Coverage of SHOT Show wouldn’t be complete without a rundown of some of the odder things we saw on the show floor. The sorts of products that make you wonder who decided this thing was something the market desperately needed.

Take, for instance, the Radetec grips in the header photo. Radetec has been faithfully setting up a pretty lavish display at SHOT Show (and NRAAM) for several years now, showing off electronic round counters for firearms. Personally, we’re of the opinion that if you’re worried enough to take the time to check a gun’s digital gas gauge, you may as well prophylactically put a fresh magazine in it, just on general principle.

We’ve never seen these shot counter grips in the wild, but somebody must be buying them.

Down in the basement of the Sands Expo Center, in the area affectionately known as “the dungeon”, Kruger Optical had their booth set up. In addition to normal-appearing scopes, they had an odd-looking reflex sight with a red laser at each corner of the mount.

The lasers are all independently adjustable and the stated purpose is that they can all be dialed in to define the corners of a shotgun’s pattern. The laser array is turned on and off by a button on the side of the housing, located right next to a second identical button that powers on a 3MOA red dot in the reflex sight, for a total of five red dots dancing in the shooter’s field of vision.

No doubt this sight will be coming soon to half every Shockwave or Tac-14 at the local range.

Not far away in the dungeon was the display of Standard Manufacturing, purveyor of double barrel pump shotguns and other firearms exotica. They had a large TV playing a looping marketing video…

Yes, that is a guy running around and blazing away from the hip with a semiautomatic shotgun while wearing a ghillie suit. No, we don’t know why he’s wearing it, either. It would seem to be rather counter to the principles of stealth and camouflage to be jumping through doorways in a shoot house, doing 12 gauge mag dumps, but we’re not marketers.

We will leave you with this one:

“What is a left-handed M14?” is the answer to the $2000 Jeopardy question in the category “Unfilled market niches you didn’t know existed.”

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