Mrs. Freeholder will learn that I should not be allowed to go to a gun show unsupervised.
Yeah. I got a little out of hand. In my defence, I got good buys on nearly everything in the picture. Really. I only paid full freight for two items, the Magpul MOE grip and the MTR Custom Leather holster. And the powder and the ammo. Almost forgot those. But the .22 was the least expensive I’ve seen it in years at $13/100. Seriously!
Of course I wouldn’t have needed the holster if I hadn’t finally drank the Glock Kool-Aid and picked up this not so little number.
The pistol that finally sucked me in was a Glock 21 (.45 ACP), a Pennsylvania State Police trade-in gun. Factory re-worked by Glock, it came with 3 magazines and all the usual goodies in the box plus a set of tritium night sights, all for $75-$100 less than a brand new 21. For that, I can take some holster wear on the finish. If it shoots as good as the Glock 19 that I shot a while back, it’s going to be a good gun.
My favorite bookseller was back. Tommy’s Books has been a fixture at the Greensboro show for as long as I”ve been going, until he missed the last few. I didn’t expect to see him. I knew he was getting on in years, and I figured that something untoward had happened, or at best he had sold out his business. Well, he was back. It turns out that this was going to be his last visit, as he had indeed had some substantial health issues. Tommy was making his farewell tour, saying goodbye to his regular customers and selling out his inventory. As you can see, I helped him out a bit. The Ultimate Thompson Book is one that I have wanted for a long while for reasons, and I plunked down the coin. Ditto the Standard Catalog of Colt Firearms, because who knows when you may need to look up an odd Python variant? Massad Ayoob’s Combat Handgunnery, the Gun Digest Book of Suppressors (for more reasons) and Glock Deconstructed rounded out the haul.
I picked up 500 rounds of CCI Mini-Mag mostly because I’ve shot and shot out of my horde for the last few years without replacing any of it. I thought I should make some sort of down payment toward rebuilding the stock. I also picked up a 4# jug of Power Pistol powder for reloading and rounded out the spluge with the Magpul MOE grip from the guys at Quantico Tactical. They manage to sell me something every time.
On a people watching note, the usual Gun Culture 2.0 broadening of the audience was again noted. I’m really loving this trend. The more people we recruit to the shooting way of life, the harder it will be for the Hillarys and Bernies and Jebs of the world to try and take away our rights. I didn’t see the near-frenzied buying I saw at Winston Salem a couple of weeks ago, but this is a much bigger show, so I may simply have not noticed it. Ammo prices continued to be pretty reasonable, and as I noted even .22 LR is starting to be nearly reasonable. I noticed that AR prices were much more reasonable, with decent guns from lesser known brands available in the $600 range. Stripped lowers could be had for as low as $65 for those same lesser known brands. Parts and parts kits were similarly available. Plenty of Magpul furniture and magazines were available.
This show also had a large number of collector grade guns available. While most of them were well beyond my budget, they weren’t beyond my appreciation, and it was a treat to see some of those beautiful Smiths, Colts and Winchesters, along with historical guns such as the Civil War collection of a 96 year old gentleman who had been collecting for 65 years and had decided it was time to sell off his collection. If I had brought a few thousand more dollars….
I suppose it’s a good thing the next Greensboro show is next fall. It’s going to take my wallet a while to recover from this one.