Vin Suprynowicz

The Associated Press represents itself as an unbiased purveyor of objective news. So I reserve the right to be disappointed — if not truly shocked or even surprised — when I see the time-honored news service embracing some of the ridiculous but currently fashionable presumptions of the ignorant but politically correct.

This past week, the SHOT show returned to Las Vegas.

This is the annual sales convention of the Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trades — a $28 billion-dollar American industry — staged here by the Connecticut-based National Shooting Sports Foundation.

An AP reporter attended the first day of the convention on Tuesday. She reported that she saw there “shinning (sic) displays of M-14s” (which are in fact scarce as hens’ teeth, licensed as “Class 3” machine guns because they’ll fire full-auto — it’s equally possible she was looking at semi-auto M-1As) and “long range rifles” (always the best kind.)

The third paragraph of her report states: “That there are renewed calls for tougher gun restrictions after a Jan. 8 shooting rampage in Arizona killed six people and wounded 13 others Ð including apparent assassination target Rep. Gabrielle Gifford, D-Ariz. — did little to dampen spirits at the giant show.”

Just to make sure the reader didn’t miss the juxtaposition of these two events — so ironically related in the mind of this reporter — the sixth paragraph of the piece expands on the “related” subject: “Jared Loughner, 22, the suspected Arizona shooter, legally purchased a Glock 19 two months before police say he opened fire at a Gifford district meet-and-greet outside a Tucson store.

“Rep. Carolyn McCarthy a New York Democrat, introduced legislation in Washington Tuesday that seeks to ban large capacity magazines such as those recovered at the Arizona crime scene,” The AP report continues. “Her husband was killed and her son seriously wounded in a 1993 shooting on the Long Island Railroad.”

The cynical way Mrs. McCarthy used the death of her estranged husband to win election to Congress is now ancient history. For the record, one more time, the Long Island Railroad killer, Jamaican-born Colin Ferguson, was already breaking the law by carrying his handgun on that train. The law did not stop him. But we’re supposed to believe if there’d been some FURTHER law, requiring him to use smaller-capacity magazines, he would have obeyed THAT one?

Existing New York law did, however, prevent any of Ferguson’s law-abiding victims from carrying the firearms they could have used to defend themselves, helping explain why he was able to blithely walk down the aisle, shooting 25 people, before he was finally tackled.

Meantime, at the risk of sounding ghoulish, Rep. Giffords is alive today — thank heavens — because the twerp in Tucson used a Glock 19 with that big, sexy magazine full of the pathetic 9mm round. Doctors have said she would not have survived a similar hit from a round of .45 or even, presumably, .40 caliber.

When magazines were limited to 10 rounds, meaning a single round had to do the job, manufacturers concentrated on and more people bought .40s and .45s.

But the main point here is the way this AP report makes it sound as though the organizers of the SHOT show should somehow be ashamed or embarrassed to go on with their show, a mere 10 days after the Arizona shooting.

This is like saying this year’s Detroit Auto Show went on, oblivious to the fact that a drunk driving a Chevy killed a pedestrian in Ohio the week before.

And they’re STILL PROMOTING CHEVIES — get it?

This is like saying a Las Vegas hardware trade show went on as scheduled, with no apparent “dampening of spirits,” no shame or embarrassment, despite the fact some lunatic used a hammer to commit a murder in Idaho last week.

Can we sense the imposition of some previously established political views, here?

The clear implication is that another Jared Loughner could have walked into the SHOT show at the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas last week, bought another Glock 19 handgun, along with magazines and ammunition, and promptly carried it outside and used it to do wrong.

But that’s simply not true. The SHOT show is a trade show, “licensee to licensee.” It’s not a retail “gun show.” (We still have those here, thank goodness. There’s one at Cashman Center this weekend, where you can exercise your constitutional right to buy your ammo, or even a firearm — though you have to obey all the same laws, including “background checks,” that you’d have to obey if you bought that firearm from the store of one of the licensed firearm dealers who exhibit there.)

But unlike “gun shows,” the SHOT Show has never been open to the general public. To get credentials, each of this year’s 58,000 attendees (excepting members of the press) had to convince organizers they were legitimate retail buyers for legitimate retail outdoor stores, gun dealerships, or police agencies, interested in seeing the wares of the 16,000 vendors from 103 countries who exhibit there.

(Furthermore, “The export of firearms is an important and growing part of the industry, so the ability to interact with buyers from foreign countries is important to the American manufacturers,” says Mr. Keane. Are we suddenly unhappy to see all those foreign visitors hanging around our Las Vegas restaurants and casinos? To see American manufacturers creating jobs here by tapping export markets?)

Attendees at the SHOT Show may carry away shopping bags full of fancy brochures, maybe the occasional souvenir plastic duck call or baseball cap, but they carry away no firearms. What the exhibitors hope is that they will place ORDERS for rifles, deer-hunting tree-stands, duck calls, tents, boots, binoculars, police or military load-bearing belts, etc., which are then shipped from distant warehouses only after the buyer demonstrates he has any and all required licenses and permits to re-sell such stuff.

In fact, if the section of the SHOT show devoted to marketing products exclusively to police agencies were set aside as a free-standing trade show, “It would be the second largest law enforcement show in the United States,” says Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel of the Shooting Sports Foundation.

So it’s not merely possible, it’s actually highly likely, that the next time an American police sniper gets the go-ahead to take out a bad guy who’s holding a gun to the head of a child or a pregnant hostage in the aftermath of a fumbled bank robbery attempt, that officer — who I hope we can all agree is the “good guy” in this scenario — will be using a rifle, a telescopic sight, an electronic range-finder, and possibly even a brand of bullet and cartridge that first came to the attention of his department at the SHOT show.

Yet the Associated Press would strongly imply the procurement officer for that department went ahead and attended the SHOT show in search of more effective tools of their trade in spite of — not allowing his “spirits to be dampened by” — the fact that a lunatic opened fire in Tucson 10 days before?

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority says the SHOT show brings $51.8 million in non-gaming revenues to the region each time it spends four days here. And if our hotels didn’t entice some of those guys to also drop some quarters in a slot machine while they were here, those guys are in the wrong line of work.

“The show is 30 years old, it’s most frequently in Las Vegas because that’s where the participants want to be,” Mr. Keane told me Wednesday. “We were here the same time last year and we will be here the same time next year. We are the largest event that the Sands and the Venetian have ever done in their history; we are the 13th largest show in North America and sixth largest show that comes to Las Vegas. We will tomorrow morning be receiving a proclamation from the Clark County Commission congratulating NSSF on its 50th anniversary.

“We bring into Las Vegas and greater Clark County area economic activity and tax revenues probably approaching if not exceeding $80 million during the four days of the show,” Mr. Keane continued. “Something that happened in Tucson is utterly unrelated. … The tragedy that occurred in Tucson was not the result of a failure of gun control laws, it was a result of a failure of the mental health system in the United States. And (the fact that) some anti-gun groups would seek to exploit this tragedy to advance their misguided political agenda is disappointing but not surprising.”