Anti-Gunners, Media Appear Outraged Over SHOT Show's Vegas Location

The firearm industry’s biggest show each year is the SHOT show. Gun enthusiasts from all over the country who can’t get into the show eagerly await posts on blogs and social media with the latest and greatest goods on them. It’s a great time for the gun community.

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However, it seems the media and anti-gunners don’t think it’s location is appropriate following the Las Vegas massacre in October.

The gun industry is holding its biggest annual trade show this week just a few miles from the site where a gunman slaughtered 58 concertgoers outside his high-rise Las Vegas hotel room in October using a display case worth of weapons, many fitted with bump stocks that enabled them to mimic fully automatic fire.

Gun control advocates, meanwhile, pointed to the irony of the location and planned a protest to renew calls for tighter gun sale regulations, including expanded background checks.

“We’re trying to show the connection between the industry that makes all the money and the damage that their products cause,” Lee Goodman, an organizer with Chicago-based Peaceful Communities, said Tuesday. His organization advocates for a rewrite of the constitutional Second Amendment right to own guns.

What exactly will be among the thousands of products crammed into the exhibition spaces at the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s SHOT Show convention, running Tuesday through Friday, will be a bit of a mystery, shielded from the public and, this year, members of the general-interest media.

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Now, remember how new media structures stories, as a general rule. They use a method called the inverted pyramid, where the most important information is at the beginning of the story and the less important stuff following. The idea is that people won’t necessarily read an entire story, so you give them the most relevant information at the top so they at least know what happened.

Why does this matter?

Well, it matters because it’s not until almost halfway down they acknowledge a key fact that anti-gunners have failed to consider in their outrage.

SHOT Show has been held for 40 years, half that time in Las Vegas, and this year’s gathering was scheduled well before the bloodshed last fall. It will have some 13 miles of aisles featuring products from more than 1,700 companies. More than 65,000 visitors are expected at the gathering, a place where connections are made and deals worth millions are struck.

In other words, this isn’t a case of insensitivity.

Yet why isn’t that mentioned sooner? After all, it seems incredibly relevant to the fact that the story opens up with the location being so close to the site of such a horrible and senseless tragedy. Why not mention it up at the top?

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Maybe because then readers would know more facts on the topic and be less inclined to be outraged.

But anti-gunners in both the media and the world, in general, don’t care about fairness in reporting. In fact, the fact there even is a SHOT show bothers them. They don’t want there being any product to see at the SHOT show. They don’t want there to be a firearm industry at all.

Yes, they might say, “Oh, we don’t want to come after your hunting rifle,” but they’ll simply label them as “sniper rifles” and come after them anyway. They will not stop until guns are gone from our lives…even though it won’t actually stop the criminals or even mass shooters.

 

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