2aguy
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- Jul 19, 2014
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This article looks at Americans and guns....
A Revealing Glimpse Into The American Commerce Of Guns - Forbes
An elevator door opens on the 20th floor of a Las Vegas hotel and, for a few breaths of fresh air, the barrier between those who own guns and those who don’t slides away.
A middle-aged woman is saying to a man of about the same age: “I love my Glock 42. I carry it—” She pauses and looks at me and three others standing quietly on the elevator. The man and woman step on and turn robotically toward the front. They seem ready to remain politely silent with strangers on a moving elevator, but just after the door closes a twenty-something woman to my left says, “I like Glocks too, but the 42 is a .380 and I think 9mm is light. So I’m excited about the Gen4 in 10mm.”
The woman who’d just stepped on turns around smiling and nodding. She says she sometimes carries a Smith & Wesson revolver chambered in .357 Magnum, but that it all depends on what she’s wearing. She says she just can’t hide the .357 in a dress.
Everyone is laughing then and speaking at once about the guns they carry. A man in a gray suit says he carries a Sig and that he likes the new modular P320 MHS and hopes it’ll be sold commercially. Another man, this one a gray-haired man in a flannel shirt, comments that the Kimber 1911 Ultra Carry II in .45 ACP is his style.
Everyone is clearly in Vegas for the SHOT Show (The Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade show). We are all wearing these placards provided by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for firearms manufacturers, around our necks like exclusive passes into the gun community. So we feel comfortable speaking openly with strangers about the personal choice of what guns we carry. Why not? Just then there were a lot of gun people in Vegas. The NSSF says 64,000 attendees came from over 100 countries to buy and sell guns, ammo and related items last week.
Even though there are over 100 million gun owners in America most still see gun ownership as a very private decision.
But the conversation was too rich to halt. The lady with the Glock 42 says she uses a Crimson Trace laser sight and the conversation turns to sights. I’m not surprised by these two women knowledgeably talking guns. New research from the NSSF found that “new target shooters—those who have taken up the sport in the last five years—are younger, female and urban when compared to established target shooters, or those participating for more than five years.” A survey commissioned by the NSSF also determined that 66 percent of new gun owners are in the 18-to-34-year-old category and 37 percent of them are female. Also, nearly half (47 percent) of new target shooters live in urban/suburban areas—so much for the assumption gun ownership is a rural thing. Of the women gun owners polled by the NSSF, those who bought a gun in the last year spent on average $870 on firearms and more than $400 on accessories.
A Revealing Glimpse Into The American Commerce Of Guns - Forbes
An elevator door opens on the 20th floor of a Las Vegas hotel and, for a few breaths of fresh air, the barrier between those who own guns and those who don’t slides away.
A middle-aged woman is saying to a man of about the same age: “I love my Glock 42. I carry it—” She pauses and looks at me and three others standing quietly on the elevator. The man and woman step on and turn robotically toward the front. They seem ready to remain politely silent with strangers on a moving elevator, but just after the door closes a twenty-something woman to my left says, “I like Glocks too, but the 42 is a .380 and I think 9mm is light. So I’m excited about the Gen4 in 10mm.”
The woman who’d just stepped on turns around smiling and nodding. She says she sometimes carries a Smith & Wesson revolver chambered in .357 Magnum, but that it all depends on what she’s wearing. She says she just can’t hide the .357 in a dress.
Everyone is laughing then and speaking at once about the guns they carry. A man in a gray suit says he carries a Sig and that he likes the new modular P320 MHS and hopes it’ll be sold commercially. Another man, this one a gray-haired man in a flannel shirt, comments that the Kimber 1911 Ultra Carry II in .45 ACP is his style.
Everyone is clearly in Vegas for the SHOT Show (The Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade show). We are all wearing these placards provided by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for firearms manufacturers, around our necks like exclusive passes into the gun community. So we feel comfortable speaking openly with strangers about the personal choice of what guns we carry. Why not? Just then there were a lot of gun people in Vegas. The NSSF says 64,000 attendees came from over 100 countries to buy and sell guns, ammo and related items last week.
Even though there are over 100 million gun owners in America most still see gun ownership as a very private decision.
But the conversation was too rich to halt. The lady with the Glock 42 says she uses a Crimson Trace laser sight and the conversation turns to sights. I’m not surprised by these two women knowledgeably talking guns. New research from the NSSF found that “new target shooters—those who have taken up the sport in the last five years—are younger, female and urban when compared to established target shooters, or those participating for more than five years.” A survey commissioned by the NSSF also determined that 66 percent of new gun owners are in the 18-to-34-year-old category and 37 percent of them are female. Also, nearly half (47 percent) of new target shooters live in urban/suburban areas—so much for the assumption gun ownership is a rural thing. Of the women gun owners polled by the NSSF, those who bought a gun in the last year spent on average $870 on firearms and more than $400 on accessories.
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