Last week, January 14 – 18, 2014, I went to the SHOT Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, to represent the Cody Firearms Museum. For those not familiar, the SHOT Show is the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade ShowSM and Conference for the firearms, ammunition, hunting, and shooting accessories industry. It features products from more than 1,600 exhibitors with more than 62,000 people in attendance! Needless to say, it can be a tad overwhelming, but well worth the trip.
Now you might be asking yourself, as many others did last week, why did a museum go to a modern industry event? The answer is not simple: first, the city of Cody hosted FMG Publication’s Shooting Industry Masters in summer 2013, when 500 industry employees supported our town and museum, so we wanted to show support for their booths at the show.
Second, many manufacturers with long histories, like Colt, Smith & Wesson, FNH USA, and Browning, as well as relatively new companies, like Glock USA, are represented in our museum. We attempt to contextualize the stories of these companies by examining the evolution of their product through modern day. And third, we don’t just display old guns in our museum. We actively encourage the acquisition of modern product as well as antiques; the products of today can be tomorrow’s history. At Cody we like to represent firearms history as something that is not static and is constantly evolving as new technologies arise and as people and their needs change.
To see images from the Show, go to the SHOT Show’s Flickr page.
Check out our Facebook and Twitter pages to see our daily updates from the Show.
