Crowds showed up en masse to the National Rifle Association's 2024 annual convention, undeterred by controversies surrounding the gun-rights group.
Row after row, booth after booth of everything from high powered sniper rifles to “Cancel Proof” banking options were offered to NRA members. And on Sunday, the last day of scheduled events, the crowds flocked to the Kay Bailey Hutchison Center to walk the over 14 acres of exhibitors.
Old Glory Bank asks potential clients to “give America’s [2nd Amendment] bank a shot.” The group highlights its bank as one “that will never cancel you for exercising your constitutional rights.”
Armed Citizens’ Educational Foundation volunteers handed out “What Every Gun Owner Needs to Know About Self-Defense Law” pamphlets — free of charge.
Among its chapters: "The High Cost of Self Defense", "The Affirmative Defense of Self Defense" and "When is Deadly Force Justified?" — which offers a creed to gun owners to consider that, if memorized and followed closely, "you should never be found guilty of a crime involving use of deadly force."
And close by a company offers people walking past the chance to try a new virtual reality shooting system.
Families with kids roamed the venue. One child laid down on a pile of ammo casings at a booth selling equipment to quickly — and efficiently — clean up spent rounds.
Uniformed Dallas Police Department officers occasionally stopped to pick up a pistol or rifle.
On one day of the event, crowds squeezed in around the Daniel Defense booth for a chance to win one of several guns in a prize drawing. The company sells high powered rifles, handguns and weapons accessories.
Hopeful attendees on Sunday, gathered near the two-story Silencer Co. convention display where a sales rep shouted into a bullhorn, announcing the beginning of a weapons giveaway.
Sig Sauer, a company originally founded as a wagon factory in Switzerland in 1751 and later turned weapons manufacturer, touted hunting rifles, shotguns, and special branded pistols.
“One riot, one ranger,” reads the inscription on one Sig Sauer 1911 handgun.
The conference also boasted three days of seminars and workshops for attendees.
Sessions like “Intro to Long Range Field Shooting” and “Choosing the Right Handgun” were geared toward helping newer gun owners and sports enthusiasts figure out where to start. Others — like “Mistakes that Land You In Prison After Defensive Gun Use” — focused on what not to do as a gun owner.
In the session, a presenter showed the audience footage of deadly firearm encounters. The crowd looked on as footage of a 2023 counter protest over a Spanish conquistador statue in New Mexico that ended in violence projected onto the venue’s screen.
“I’m not saying he’s absolutely going to get convicted because you never can tell what a jury is going to do,” the seminar presenter told the crowd.
That’s because a jury is “12 people that have a combined roughly six hundred years of life experience and an IQ of 1200,” he continued. “I liken a jury to a dragon…you don’t know what that dragon is interested in.”
The types of workshops offered and the convention entirely comes after the one year anniversary of the mass shooting at the Allen Premium Outlets near Dallas, where a gunman with neo-Nazi tattoos shot and killed eight people, earlier this month.
The two-year anniversary of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde Texas where a teenage gunman shot and killed 19 children and two adults is later this week.
Got a tip? Email Nathan Collins at ncollins@kera.org. You can follow Nathan on Twitter @nathannotforyou.
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