Soylent SHOT, What is SHOT Show?

Much like Soylent Green, SHOT Show is people.

It’s not really about the guns and gear and gadgetry that are unveiled annually, although it’s easy to be mesmerized by the hype and ad blitzes that inevitably accompany all the new product launches.

At its heart, SHOT Show is a trade show that, along with the National Association of Convenience Stores or the World of Concrete Expo, brings tens of thousands of buyers and sellers together in Vegas to do buying and selling. It also brings media types to write about the things being bought and sold.

But because let’s face it, guns are cooler than Twinkies or concrete, it also generates a ton of buzz among enthusiasts eager to learn about the new stuff. You can’t walk twenty feet without inadvertently photobombing someone recording a video, which probably is not a problem at World of Concrete.

The buyers mill about the floor, inking Stocking Dealer agreements and meeting with reps at manufacturers and wholesalers who are only a voice on the other end of the phone for the other fifty-one weeks of the year. Entrepreneurial inventors hit up manufacturers and big wholesalers, trying to drum up interest in (and buyers for) their various better mousetraps.

Plague Preparedness for SHOT

For media types, it’s a chance to touch base with connections at various manufacturers… or to find out you don’t have one there anymore. It’s a small industry, and SHOT is sometimes where you find out that the Media Relations person who kept you in the loop with new products or the engineer who kept you clued in on upgrades on their latest design is now wearing a different logo’ed polo shirt at another booth halfway across the show floor.

SHOT Show is people buying and selling and doing media coverage. It’s also people sneezing and coughing and catching SHOT Show crud. Savvy attendees are already dosing up on prophylactic doses of zinc as I write this and, based on social media traffic, Purell does land-office business in hand sanitizer sales every mid-January.

SHOT Show is not for the phobic of poor gun handling skills.

In the age of internet communications, the face-to-face nature of SHOT Show means people meeting at casino hotel bars after hours and negotiating business deals that will affect the industry for the year to come.

No matter how exhausting, annoying, and infecting it can be, SHOT is the pole star of the gun world’s calendar year, and we’re going to bring you the best coverage of it that you can get.

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