SHOT Show 2022 thoughts and reflections

Jan 22 2022 Daniel Sharp

Another SHOT Show has come to an end and my feet hurt. It was awesome to see familiar faces and all the new innovations in the tactical sector. The majority of the people there were respectful professionals. However, there were a few goobers. Here are some of my thoughts about the event.

Tactical Santa

One of the funniest thing was seeing the chubby old vets with a sack full of swag. They indignantly stomp from table-to-table, gobbling up every scrap of freebies in sight. Stickers, pens, velcro wallets, it doesn’t matter if they already have 27 wallets, they want more. They don’t talk to the vendors. They are only there for the novelties, and to fart up all the aisles.

Mask debacle

Nevada has a statewide mask mandate. A fair amount of attendants were not happy about it. My personal beliefs aside, it was comical seeing the health board officials go toe-to-toe with the handful of attendants chanting “let’s go Brandon.”

New gear

Seeing new products before they hit the market is pretty awesome. Watching tacti-bros trying to act like they already know everything about everything they see… that is gold. It makes me wonder why I’m apparently the only one who’s not already a master of every piece of equipment in existence.

Walking up to a booth

The moment you walk up to a booth, eyes begin darting to your badge. This will determine the way you’re about to be treated. If they see you as a potential buyer or someone who can help them, you’ll get a much warmer reception. Some booths will expect you to already know why their product is impressive, even if they just invented it.

Takeaways

Everyone runs out of business cards fairly fast. It’s a good idea to have a QR code for people to scan. The food options available on site gave me the goose poops. Next time I’ll bring snacks. It is easy to get lost, they told us if you walked by every vendor present, the trail would be 35 miles. However, the app had a built in GPS to show you how to find specific booths.