Overkill - Our correspondent is blown away at the largest gun show in the U.S.(Barf Alert)

LAS VEGAS—My nametag revealed I was a journalist from Alaska, so I said I was researching an article on firearms for bear protection in the Last Frontier backcountry. Century International Arms salesman Steve Sanko reached into a glass display case and came up with a bulky, tricked-out handgun.

“If you’re looking for a compact bear gun, this is the best we have to offer,” Sanko said. “It’s our new for 2011, Centurion AK 39, semi-automatic pistol.”

I handled the gun. It looked more like Han Solo’s blaster pistol than one of the big bore revolvers—.44 magnums and .454 Casulls—that Alaskans often pack in bear country when they’re too lazy to carry a shotgun or a rifle. Those guns hold six bullets. The one in my hands could fire 30 rounds without reloading.

“The high-capacity magazine makes it illegal in New Jersey, Massachusetts, California, Connecticut and Hawaii, but in Alaska—no problem!”

The Centurion AK 39 is chambered to fire 7.62x39mm Soviet-origin assault rifle rounds, the standard issue bullets for AK-47s. They’re excellent for killing people. For killing animals, however, I wouldn’t trust them to drop anything larger than a Sitka blacktail deer, and certainly not a brown bear. I’d rather be armed with pepper spray. Or bottle rockets. Or a bell.

I expressed concern as to whether 7.62x39mm bullets, even 30 of them, would be powerful enough to drop a brown bear before it had time to rip off significant chunks of my flesh. I said I feared that might embed in the bear’s fat and thereby piss him off all the more. Sanko had this pat answer: “Well, you’re going to need Chinese steel-core armor-piercing rounds.”

“Wellll, yes and no,” came his reply. “You can’t bring them in [to the country], but it’s pretty much legal to possess them, and they’re out there. You can find them. Just ask around.”

He gestured beyond his own sales booth to the sea of weaponry filling the main hall of the Sands Expo & Convention Center, one block from the Las Vegas Strip. It was day three of the 2011 SHOT Show, the largest annual gathering of firearms makers and dealers in the United States. This year the convention was held in late January. It marked the 33rd annual SHOT Show and the biggest yet. More than 50,000 attendees reveled in a mind-boggling orgy of firepower displayed by about 1,600 exhibitors spread across more than 650,000 square feet of total exhibit space. That’s five times the size of the casino floor at Caesar’s Palace.

Looming over the main entrance was a massive banner of a leering Grim Reaper with glowering red-eyes, wielding a scythe. It advertised a laser scope called the Eliminator.   

Death personified also symbolized the timing of SHOT, which began just 10 days after Jared Loughner opened fire on a crowd in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people and wounding 13, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Loughner used a Glock-19 handgun, the same gun used in 2007 by Virginia Tech spree shooter Seung-Hui Cho to kill 32 people and wound 17. Lougher’s Glock-19 was equipped with a 30-round magazine. Cho’s held 15 bullets.

I went to SHOT to gauge the mood of the firearms industry in the immediate wake of the Tucson shootings, which reenergized the national debate over gun control in America. What I found in Las Vegas was lethality mania, with major firearms manufacturers and distributors promoting new lines of weapons that hold even more bullets and with various gadgets and tactical features that supposedly “maximize operator lethality.” In other words, they’re better able to kill human beings in greater numbers and with more efficiency. That’s all they’re good for—not target shooting, not hunting, just killing people.

Smith & Wesson is perhaps the most quintessentially American firearms company. It was founded in 1852. I bought my Dad a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum for Christmas a few years back. At SHOT, the guns on display at the Smith & Wesson exhibit provided a vivid Darwin-chart of the evolution of the modern handgun from the straightforward, classic, Wild West-style revolver to new-fangled guns like the Smith & Wesson M&P 15-22P. It’s all curves and serrations, equipped with a 25-round “banana clip” magazine, a muzzle flash suppressor and a “ported” barrel with holes to lessen blowback and heighten control during rapid fire. The M&P 15 is part of Smith & Wesson’s popular “Military & Police” line of firearms that, despite their branding, are perfectly legal in Alaska for civilians to purchase.

The manufacture for sale in the U.S. of handgun magazines holding more than 10 rounds, known as “high-capacity” magazines, was prohibited under the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). That law expired in 2004. Attempts to renew it have been thwarted by the National Rifle Association, aided by legions of firearms industry lobbyists.

The self-defense applications of high-capacity handguns that fire 15, 25, 30, or 50 rounds without reloading are dubious at best. Yet since the expiration of the AWB, high-capacity magazines have become integral to the core marketing strategies of firearms manufacturers. Here’s why: Unlike televisions or blue jeans, firearms don’t wear out in a matter of months or years. Gun ownership has been in long-term decline over the last 40 years. The industry experienced a brief resurgence in 2009 after President Obama’s election stirred fears of new gun control laws. However, that buying surge has evaporated and left the industry reeling as many recent buyers have sold their firearms, flooding the secondary market. To lure repeat buyers, increased lethality has become the nicotine of the firearms industry. But for the most part, increased lethality equates to pointless overkill.

Consider the legitimate personal protection needs of Alaskans when it comes to defending against their fellow man. First, there’s “home defense,” that is, defending one’s residence against intruders. The best weapon’s a shotgun. Easy to operate, no need to aim with high precision, fun for the whole family. Plus, the distinctive chik-chik sound of a shell being chambered in a pump-action shotty is known and respected all over the world. But let’s say that for whatever reason, you want to keep a handgun for home defense. Fine. Why in the hell do you need 25, 30 or 50 bullets and a ported barrel? Are you Al Pacino in the last scene of Scarface?

Moving on to concealed carry. Packing some heat beneath your street clothes on a day-to-day basis. Legal in Alaska without a permit. Again, why do you need a high-capacity magazine? I can think of just one reasonable scenario: zombie attack. If a zombie virus breaks out in Anchorage, and you’re caught downtown, you’re going to want a gun like the M&P 15-22P to blast your way through the undead hordes shuffling down Fifth Avenue. Otherwise, it’s just overkill. Unless you’re a deranged spree shooter. Deranged spree shooters have a particular fondness for high-capacity magazines.

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here, and I’m hardly anti-gun. The way I see it, owning a firearm in Alaska is like owning a Sports Utility Vehicle in Alaska—totally justifiable. Rugged individualism, outdoors adventuring, subsistence hunting, self-reliance, frontier mentality, I’m all about it. But surely reasonable Alaskans can support the broad concept of private gun ownership while agreeing that high-capacity assault rifles and handguns hold no constructive purpose in this state or any other.

My gun of choice for both home protection and bear protection is a Mossberg 500 shotgun. It’s also serviceable for bird hunting. Looking for a dose of sanity amidst the lethality mania at SHOT, I made my way to the Mossberg display area to check out their new shotguns. What I found was tough guy lifestyle marketing taken to a new extreme with Mossberg’s 2011 line of customized Blackwater-signature “special purpose” shotguns.

Yes, that Blackwater. The notorious American guns-for-hire company that changed its name to Xe in 2009 to distance itself from a string of bloody misdeeds committed by Blackwater “private security contractors” in Iraq, including the September, 2007 Nisour Square massacre, in which Blackwater mercenaries killed 17 Iraqi civilians.

The Blackwater shotguns from Mossberg are emblazoned with a vintage Blackwater logo: the company’s former name above a bear-paw in crosshairs. They also incorporate new features that represent what Mossberg salesman Chuck Spaulding termed “a Blackwater design aesthetic.” These include a gnarly, jagged-edged barrel extension on the pistol grip Mossberg 500BW (dealer price $447).

“You can use that to stick in a door and blow off a hinge, or to take a core sample out of somebody’s chest if you find yourself in a hand-to-hand situation,” Spaulding said.

Of course it wasn’t just firearms manufacturers rolling out new, more deadly products at SHOT. Ammunition-makers likewise promoted new bullets designed to heighten the damage they cause to the human body. For example, this year the Nebraska-based handgun ammunition manufacturer Hornady, one of the leaders in the industry, introduced .44 Special and .45 Colt caliber rounds to its popular Critical Defense line of “personal defense” hollow-point handgun rounds. (Hollow point bullets expand or “mushroom” when they enter a human body, amplifying tissue damage, blood loss and shock.)  

“The only problem with typical hollow-point rounds is that when they travel through heavy clothing, the tip of the bullet tends to clog up, which doesn’t allow the bullet to fully expand,” explained Hornady salesman Tom Mills. “The Critical Defense line bullets solve that problem by having a flexible tip that allows for maximum penetration and maximum expansion.” Mills held up a gleaming Critical Defense .45 Colt round. “This offers 13 inches of penetration into ballistic gel [which simulates human tissue] when fired through the standard FBI heavy clothing protocol. In other words, ‘Hasta la vista, baby.’”

The action movie character that coined that phrase—the Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgment Day—glowered at SHOT attendees from the cover of glossy brochures piled at either end of a row of dozens of .50 caliber Desert Eagle handguns in the Magnum Force sales display. The Desert Eagle has been featured in more than 500 Hollywood films and television shows, and name-checked in dozens. The brochures gleefully tag the burly pistol “a pop cultural icon.” Custom models on display included a Desert Eagle with the Grim Reaper laser-etched on its grip and one plated in 24K gold.

Magnum Force was just one of many high-profile firearms manufacturers that used the prevalence of their guns in Hollywood movies as a marketing gimmick at SHOT. The German arms manufacturer Carl Walther GmbH Sportwaffen made sure no one forgot that Sean Connery-era James Bond flicks granted its Walther PPK .380 semi-automatic legendary status as the undercover weapon of choice for 007. As with the Desert Eagle, the Walther PPK was on display at SHOT in a variety of festive special editions that James Bond wouldn’t be caught dead wearing beneath his tuxedo: neon blue, hot pink, even a Walther PPK decorated with a Dutch pottery-style fleur-de-lis pattern.

The Smith & Wesson exhibit boasted a “Smith & Wesson on the Silver Screen” display of the actual Smith & Wesson firearms used during filming by Hollywood stars playing iconic characters in famous movies, such as Danny Glover as good cop Roger Murtaugh in the original Lethal Weapon, Heath Ledger as mass-murdering supervillain The Joker in The Dark Knight and, of course, Clint Eastwood as “Dirty” Harry Callahan in The Enforcer.

Yet the most famous Smith & Wesson movie firearm of them all, the “Feel lucky punk?” .44 Magnum carried by Eastwood in the original Dirty Harry, was nowhere to be seen in the Smith & Wesson display. That’s because it was beneath glass in the National Rifle Association SHOT exhibit Hollywood Guns.

Like Smith & Wesson, the NRA gave equal billing to movie heroes and movie villains. Also in Hollywood Guns was the Remington shotgun with attached silencer carried by the sociopathic hitman No Country For Old Men played by Javier Bardem.

The reality of SHOT was thousands of yards downrange from the image projected by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association that owns SHOT and celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. The NSSF portrays SHOT as representing the business interests of family-friendly, outdoors recreation-focused “shooting sports” that are popular in Alaska, such as moose hunting and clay target shooting.

These sports are represented at SHOT, as they are in the firearms industry as a whole, but they’re vastly overshadowed by handguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, home defense shotguns and the like, along with hollow point bullets, concealed carry holsters, tactical clothing and other “personal protection” accoutrements. As the bumper sticker for sale at the Second Amendment Foundation booth put it: “The Second Amendment Ain’t About Duck Hunting.” Yet to watch the video presentation at the State of the Industry Dinner on the first night of SHOT this year was to be shown images of sons and fathers duck hunting together wearing orange vests and carrying traditional shotguns, rather than the destructive force of .50-caliber sniper rifles. (Such rifles, by the way, are capable of piercing an aircraft hull, let alone blowing a head off, at 1,500 yards. Because they’re classified as rifles, however, they’re less regulated than handguns.)

“What we have in common is we all share a common destiny and a common vision. We want to see our children and our grandchildren growing up and enjoying those same recreational activities and the shooting sports we all hold so dearly,” said NSSF president Steve Sanetti in his keynote address. “Our goal is clear and unchanging: We want more. More hunters and more target shooters… and more freedom to do what Americans have done since this nation began.”  

Nowhere was the chasm between SHOT show messaging and reality more glaringly evident than in the wares on display in the Century International Arms exhibit space. The Florida-based company specializes in cheap AK-47 knockoff assault rifles from onetime Eastern Bloc nations like Bulgaria and Romania. Century was doing brisk business at SHOT in both assault rifles and assault rifle ammunition—Egyptian and Romanian-manufactured rounds available for wholesale purchase at $4.87 per 50-round box, or $89.97 for a 2,000-round case. Serbian-made sniper rounds went for $8.87 per box.

“We’re having a good show,” said Century sales rep Sanko. “We had the post-Obama boom, now I think we’re seeing a post-Tucson boom.”  

I’m of mixed minds about this article. Clearly the article is biased as all hell, but at least in this case the author knows a little bit about the subject, which is a blessed relief from the usual ignorant leftist banter.

An analogy to his chain of thought is very typical among the left. “I have a small economy car and it is sufficient for my needs. So everyone else should be satisfied with having just a small, economy car, because no matter where they live or what they do, it is all they *need*. And the government should intervene by making a law that everybody can only own small, economy cars.”

Truthfully, no matter *what* we would argue to him about the *rest* of his argument, he would take it to mean that we dispute the value of *his* having a small, economy car.

Practically speaking, in the real world, guns are tools that the gun owner wants to be utilitarian, doing the job he wants it to do well. But what a gun owner needs, by his opinion, can be very different from what a gun owner *wants*, again, by his opinion.

Few people buy guns because they need to fire them often. Many more buy them because at intervals they need to brandish them, like policemen. Others to carry them when out in public because they might need them sometimes.

But the vast majority of people buy guns they will keep at home, only rarely if ever using, often only in an emergency.

And this leans heavily to the “wants” side of the equation, instead of the “needs” side. But no matter what the needs and wants are, they are protected as a *right*, and this is the most important thing.

It is not up to others, nor should it be, to tell you what your needs and wants are. Even if you live in the suburbs in America, if you feel you need to own an elephant gun, or just if you want to own an elephant gun, that is your right.

Because, to quote Groucho Marx, “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas! How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”

And you’ll also never know how much PCP it took for that armed home invader, so that about the only weapon that could stop him was an elephant gun.

But that is not the point.

I happen to live in Alaska, sometimes I wonder if these people get all their info purely off the internet.

Just about everyone I know that may be in contact with a bear or most likely will be in a bears territory WILL carry a rifle. if they carry a pistol its usually used to drop a buddy so the bear will eat him instead of you. (just kidding folks)

My bear shotgun which is just for defense and not for actual hunting is a short barreled Remington Model 11, almost exactly the same as the Browning A-5 Auto. For hunting its either my .338 or a .375, BUT even the much ridiculed Mini 14 will take down a small black bear, I know that for a fact, and so would the SKS with the 7.62x39.

On the occasion when I have gone salmon fishing near a heavily populated campground with several hundred fellow fishermen I do carry a 10mm Glock.

I do not open carry, isn’t really any need for it but then I do not visit the populated area of Anchorage either, if I do I either carry my .45 or a compact .380. I always carry those in my truck and sometimes the Model 11 as we do get bears at where I work.

He sounds like exactly the kind of unstable individual who has no business with a firearm of any kind.

Child molesters are beyond detestable. Why not, however, accuse his alleged molester openly? While criminal charges are probably not a possibility, a civil suit would be.

Of course, as evidenced by his story at the gun show, Mr. Holthouse may not be the most truthful individual around. His story of molestation may or may not be true, and accusing the alleged molester openly might bring the facts to light. Then too, it's entirely possible that the entire story, from start to finish, is fiction. He wouldn't be the first "journalist" to do something like that, either.

His newspaper should at least publish his "murder/revenge fantasy" right alongside his gun show story, though, don't you think?

I read an article years ago that said the most popular rifle with Alaskan Eskimos was the 22 Hornet!

They used it for everything from hunting seals to polar bear. The claim was that the ammo was cheap, and with a very well placed shot, it would kill anything.

I have no idea if the article was telling the truth about their favorite rife at that time, but I have no doubt that the 22 hornet will kill anything in North America if you put the shot in the right spot.

Yes its true, many things are different up here, first off and I will use the term Eskimo as a general description of the different tribes we have up here.

The natives here are very very good hunters, ammunition will cost more getting it to the villages so they use it wisely and also so as to not destroy the meat. For many generations the hunters would kill the polar bears with nothing more than sharp softened bones they would warp in in meat, the bear eats the cartilage in a frozen ball and then it thaws out and rips open the intestines.

Its the white hunters that go for the big magnum loads.

They still use a harpoon for whales when doing it out of tradition but many are using a .50BMG now.

Quite right about 007 and his .32 caliber Walther PPK. In my youth I wanted one more than any other pistol. Then age and maturity set in as my very own PPK found a place of honor in the safe, and my much more adult-oriented M1911A1 took its place.

Carry a .32 instead of a .45 automatic? No way, Achmed!

Anyway, this Holthouse twerp is a smarmy knowitall. His assertion that gun ownership is declining amongst the populace is laughable.

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