I have attended and instructed at the Soldier of Fortune Convention before with Col Applegate but never before had I been to the SHOT Show. I attended the 2006 SHOT Show as part of a team assisting the military of a foreign country with deciding on a wide range of new products.
Our team was made of people with specialist expertise in a wide range of areas that included gunsmithing, sniping and armed and unarmed combat. We all had duties to attend to in our respective fields that required us to spend all day every day working our way around the show obtaining information as per our specialist areas.
I spent the first hour with the show catalogue and map marking my companies of interest in a logical order. Our principal, a Royal and Military officer, also attended the show daily and we met daily to brief him on our progress and findings.
The show is simply massive and comprises of over 24,366 buyers, 14,753 exhibiting personnel from 1,846 companies, 1,385 members of the press and 388 guests for a record total attendance of 40,892. The show encompassed 616,300 square feet of exhibit space, surpassing last year’s mark of 569,030. Some of these booths are as big as basketball courts and decked out in the latest and most eye catching of layouts with first class signage and displays.
The show venue, the Las Vegas Convention Centre is over 2.9 million square metres and the show also had a huge marquee out the front.
The Las Vegas Convention Centre is centrally located in the Las Vegas Valley and offers convenient and quick access to more than 18,000 guest rooms all within walking distance and 50,000 guest rooms within 83 feet to three miles of the Convention Centre. Only three miles away, the Downtown/Casino Centre area provides over 9,000 rooms. McCarran International Airport and Las Vegas' business district are also within minutes of the Convention Centre – both just 3 miles away.
Considering there are no retail customers allowed at the show and it is not for selling products at the time the attendance of 40,892 is incredible indeed.
There were 1,846 exhibiting companies at the show and the goods they offered included everything from military, police, and civilian firearms and ammunition and accessories to paint ball, knives, fishing and hunting, clothing and camouflage, optics and target systems, to vehicles and camping equipment and much more and every variation of it.
There were demonstrations and samples and giveaways and it must have cleared many a forest to make all the paper required that went into making the endless glossy catalogues.
There were many food outlets around the show but they struggled to cater for the masses in attendance.
This is a serious show where buyers meet suppliers and make big buying decisions that will decide what their stores will have on the racks in the year to come.
There were many nationalities present and many suppliers of the different brands of the same goods giving the buyer plenty to evaluate and think about.
The following is a list of the sections of the show: Firearms & Ammunition, Outdoor Wear, General Shooting & Hunting, Paintball, Law Enforcement.
You meet some really interesting people at the SHOT Show and I met friends and association members like Mike Janich who was there with Black Hawk, and Kelly Worden who was there with Ontario Knives as well as my good friends Larry Jordan and Charlie Carroll who flew in to meet me at the show.
Some big exhibitors at the show included camouflage giant Mossy Oak, Ellett Brothers, Kick-Eez, a Washington company that makes firearm recoil pads, Beretta, RCS Classic Firearm, and ESPN Outdoors.
I met several NZ and Australian exhibitors at the show offering everything from handcuffs to camouflage suits and nets through to hunting and fishing safaris down under.
The contacts I made at the show and the information gained will determine the suppliers and manufacturers as well as processors and products required to complete many of the projects we have ready to proceed in the months to come.
From a float plane to a police car of yesteryear and full size mounted bears and interactive displays for laser target shooting and knives and rifles and pistols as far as the eye could see the show was spectacular to say the least and you simply could not get around it and cover everything in a single week.
From the SHOT Show it was off interstate to visit some of the exhibitors at their factories and warehouses and place orders as well as do some instructing before flying out.
For buyers, sellers and manufacturers the SHOT Show is simply an opportunity not to be missed if you want to be up to date and informed with what’s out there and what’s coming out.
I am already looking forward to next year’s SHOT Show and have plenty of projects to finish before then with the input and assistance of contacts made at the SHOT Show.
