TINCANBANDIT Goes to the S.H.O.T. Show! Day One

 As a member of the gun press, I have had the opportunity to attend the S.H.O.T. Show but had not yet taken advantage of it.

If you are reading this and do not know what the SHOT show is, I will explain.

SHOT stands for the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade show. The show mainly focuses on the firearms industry, but also includes law enforcement, hunting, overlanding and camping. It is held in Las Vegas every January.

Now that I live driving distance from Las Vegas I no longer had an excuse to not attend.

For those that don't know, the S.H.O.T Show was canceled last year due to the China Virus.

This year the NSSF was committed to having the show, their motto this year as ALL IN. Unfortunately, not all vendors subscribed to this motto, but we will get to that. 

I was traveling with the WaGuns team, all three of which were SHOT Show veterans.  

I'll cover different things in the next few posts to give you an idea of my impressions and what I saw. I don't want this to be like the other media who are reporting (or already have reported) on the SHOT show, I want to bring a different perspective if I can.

Day one was range day at the Boulder Rifle and Pistol Club.

We drove to the range, getting there just after they opened the gates at 8:30 for the members of the gun press.

at our first range, we made our first celebrity sighting, Dr. Sebastion Gorka was testing out a suppressed 9mm AR

It was here that I got to fire my first machine gun, a short barreled, full auto AK-47....what a hoot.

Here is one of the WaGuns team getting ready to fire the beast

After watching a demonstration on the Rubox wall (a wall made of hollow rubber boxes that are filled with small rocks)

We then got a demonstration on the new Savage pistol, called the Stance 

We all took a turn at shooting the compact 9mm, it ran well, but we did find a few faults. 

Then we stopped by the Aero Precision booth. We asked about their "secret" bolt action project and got vague answers....

On our way down the hill we swung by the long range rifle bays and got to talking with the folks from Bishop ammunition. They had an AR variant there chambered in their massive 475 Bishop round.

The round is a necked rifle case with a seriously rebated rime (to match the AR-10 bolt I assume). The round is capable of sending a 390 grain bullet to 2,500fps with over 5,200 lbs of muzzle energy.

More info here

 here is a video of our crew leader shooting the rifle

Continuing down the hill we stopped by the Armscor range and shot some of their fine ammo and guns.

They had their new STK100 pistol on display

At the next stop we shot some shotgun rounds at the Winchester/Browning range.

We thought about stopping in at the Glock range, but it was pretty busy.

At the Walther range they were shooting some video, and we had our second celebrity sighting, a Veteran Spokesman and shooter Omar Avila also known as Crispy 11B

Federal Ammo was next door, and they had the new pistol cartridge, the .30 Super Carry on hand for us to try.

The .30 Super Carry looks to be a shortened .30 Carbine round, but it was actually developed from the ground up with no parent cartridge. It uses a 32 caliber (.312 diameter) bullet, same as the .32 ACP and .32 S&W/H&R Mag/.327 Federal Mag. The case is not close enough to the .32 ACP to allow for reloading with the auto dies. RCBS is said to have the dies ready to ship. I am sure others will follow. 

The .30 Super Carry has nearly the same muzzle energy, speed and penetration as the 9mm, but will have a smaller bullet width to length ratio and offer a couple of extra rounds over the same size magazine.

They had several pistols chambered for the diminutive round, we tried all of them.

We all walked away impressed with how easy shooting the round was, recoil was very mild and muzzle rise was almost like that of a .22 LR.

The video:

Diamondback Firearms had their new 5.7mm AR based pistols and rifles available, we of course relieved them of some of their ammo

We were lured into the BRG USA tent and shot their new BRG9 Elite. If the gun appears to be a copy of the Springfield XD, you maybe be correct.

After consuming our free lunch (thank you Profense and North Star Arms) we did killed some clay pigeons (at least some of us did) at the Sporting Clays range.

and that wrapped up Day One. We had a lot of fun and got to see some interesting new stuff.

It was a little disappointing that several companies didn't bother to show up.