Gunshow Truth

Geek with .45 is telling it like it is:

It came to pass at a show out in Virginia, the one near the Dulles airport, perhaps a year after 9/11. Apparently, there was some sort of emergency at the airport that called for the evacuation of the gunshow. A voice came on over the PA, announcing the situation.

My friend tells me that the hall grew quiet, as people listened. In that silence, just about everyone in the show simultaneously arrived at the same decision, and for the next 30 seconds, all you heard was the kerplopple of steel on kydex and leather, the snips of zipties coming off, and the glorious ka shink! of a thousand people simultaneously racking rounds into chambers.

Movies generally do a really crappy job of portraying gun owners and gun shows. In Dirty Harry the villian has been disarmed so he goes into a convenience store, looks over the counter, steals the owner's gun that is kept there, and shoots the owner with it.

In Showtime the villians shoot up a gunshow with automatic weapons. They do the typical A-team shoot-over-everyones-head thing. In the movie the gun owners run like a typical frightened crowd and the villians walk out of the arena unscathed. In real life the villains would have about thirty seconds to shoot and scoot. After those thirty seconds are over, the gun show attendees will have gotten their bearings and there won't be anything left of the villians except bloodstains.