NRA 2014!

Good times at the National Rifle Association convention, April 25-27 in Indianapolis, Indiana. This is something I can share with my parents, who aren't as into anime and superheroes as I am for some reason. NRA's bit of a different crowd than the anime/comics/pop culture gatherings I usually go to, but there were some similarities.

Sixgun and ammo's real, and live steel on the knife, but they'd otherwise be right at home with any cosplayer.

Me and an Emma Frost cosplayer (or spokesmodel for EAA Corps' line of European gun designs).

Red Alert 3 cosplay (representative for Century International Arms' Red Army Standard line of ammo).

Hit a couple panel discussions -- guns of Battle of the Bulge during World War II and guns of Vietnam's MACV SOG. Just Powerpoint slides with no actual guns to show off, which was kinda disappointing for an NRA convention, but the speakers were interesting. The SOG panel was by Maj. John Plaster (ret), with first hand stories from Vietnam.

Exhibit hall was massive. It's a swag feeding frenzy, filling sacks full of free catalogs, hats, t-shirts, and other stuff. And gun makers stock their booth spaces with thousands of rifles, shotguns, and pistols of all sizes and shapes for people to examine and handle (play with).

Pick them up. Work the action. the slide.Try out the trigger. That's why they're there!

People weren't playing with this one.

Another Gatling, a minigun mounted on a VW bus. Gunmakers are not without a sense of whimsy.

Shotguns powerful like a motorcycle and elegant like pretty violinists!

Beretta had a green screen at their booth, for free pics. I picked an ARX160.

Lots of celebs I wanted to see scattered about the exhibit hall at their sponsors' booths. WIll Hayden and Joe Meaux of "Sons of Guns" on Discovery, up from their Red Jacket Firearms business in Louisiana to hang out with Mossberg.

They seemed down to earth. "I never know what to say to people," I heard Will remark to Joe as I walked up.

They seemed down to earth. "I never know what to say to people," I heard Will remark to Joe as I walked up.

Shooting champ Doug Koenig.

Self defense expert Massad Ayoob. I've been reading his stuff for decades.

Jerry Miculek, his wife Kay and their daughter Lena for Smith & Wesson. Jerry is a longtime trick shooter known for speed shooting revolvers and pistols.

Youtube's Hickok45 and his videographer son, John. They are very tall.

Hickok45 has more than a million subscribers to his youtube channel, filled with videos of him shooting guns at his home in Tennessee, not far from Ft. Campbell, where I was stationed a quarter century ago.

Excellent musical entertainment Saturday night in Lucal Oil Stadium, home of the Colts. It was an NRA event, so that means country music! Alabama and Sara Evans, with special guest Cheryl LuQuire. We sat far from the stage but it was all good.

Alabama sings their new song, "(Aren't We) All Americans?", a conciliatory number about compromise and understanding. Applause seemed lighter for this one -- we weren't there for that kind of stuff!

Excellent show by Sara Evans!

Up-and-comer Cheryl LuQuire opens the show.

Singer and songwriter Cheryl LuQuire performed some excellent foot-stomping independent-woman type songs along with some heartbreakers, so I went to get her CD, autograph, and picture -- my usual fan behavior. I was in line for that when Sarah Palin gave her speech with that odd waterboarding-as-baptism line. Sarah got a bit carried away, I suppose.

Cheryl and her guitarist husband Adam Stark. They sold out their CDs, which was cool. They had boxes of the things!

The whole convention was also a social experiment of sorts. Understandably catching flak some time back for banning civilian guns at that year's convention, this time folks with concealed carry permits were welcome to bring them, and no permit needed at all to open carry (I think). Banning loaded guns at an NRA convention isn't a bad idea, with all the gun handling and trigger pulling going on in dense crowds, but it's laughably hypocritical. Many believe guns in and of themselves increase people's proclivity towards violence, so such a gun-saturated environment should have pushed some of those loaded-gun toters right off the edge into let's-just-shoot-people territory. Certainly, local letter-to-editor writers and facebook posters thought it would. But it didn't happen. So now we know that, at least.