Andy Martin

Calling the shots

Rubbing shoulders with the hunters, urban cowboys and trigger-happy heroes at Las Vegas’s Shot Show

 

 Las Vegas

They say that there are more guns in America than human beings and most of them seemed to be at Shot Show in Las Vegas last week. Shot (Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade) Show — the firearms industry’s biggest shop window — occupied several floors of a building roughly the size of Wembley Stadium, wedged between a couple of casinos and a replica of the Grand Canal. Like a kleptomaniac at Harrods, I didn’t know what to try out first. I was momentarily torn between being Dirty Harry (at the Smith & Wesson stand, with the most powerful handgun in the world) and James Bond (I couldn’t find the Walther PPK, it seems to have given way to the PPQ). Winchester, Springfield, Beretta, Glock, Sig Sauer, Mossberg, Heckler & Koch: how could I not be bewitched by the sheer poetry of such names? Not to mention the nostalgia of tucking a classic Colt six-shooter or two in my belt. But Che Guevara, I thought, and other fans of the classic AK-47 might have been shocked to come across the very glitzy Kalashnikov USA stand (‘Russian tradition, American innovation’). Maybe it was the smell of powder or gun oil, but there was definitely an aphrodisiac quality to Shot Show. I kid you not when I say that a higher than normal proportion of the women there struck up a conversation with me. They weren’t all trying to sell me extra ammo, either. ‘Honey, if I had hair like yours, I’d be a real bitch,’ said one smoking gun-toter. But the truth is I only had eyes for Amanda Lynn Mayhew. Amanda is a hunter and a fitness fanatic (she actually owns a magazine called Fytness Fanatik) who is in training for a bodybuilding competition: ‘Doing a lot of tightening and toning.’ She works for the Department of Natural Resources in Canada and regularly shoots moose and deer and bear in northern Ontario.

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