Oh boy, the biggest WAC show of the year. Maybe, relative to their other shows lately. But relative to past years, not. It's pretty obvious that attendance and buying/selling action is way down. The show has an adjusted starting time of 9:00 AM these days, as against the old time of 8:00 AM. Used to be within an hour of show start, traffic on the off-ramp from the nearby freeway was lined up back onto the freeway. This year, it was an easy off.
Once in the hall at the fairgrounds, used to be aisles were so crowded at this show that you had to kinda crab-walk from side to side to get through. No crowding at the show today, pretty easy passage through the aisles. Mostly same old crowd of geriatric old buggers such as myself, not all that much new blood in sight. And that's part of the problem nation-wide. People all crowded up in cities, no place to shoot, faces stuck in electronic diversions; young people are falling away from guns.
These days sales at WAC shows are inhibited by the legal requirement to run a private sale through an FFL dealer. The show management tries to facilitate this, but going through the process can be slow. Some guys are stuck in the old days, just won't buy a gun on paper. If the NICS computers go down (as sometimes happens), the sales cannot be processed and mostly fall through. People don't want to have to drive around unnecessarily to complete the sale.
A more recent political development in WA is having a stifling effect, in my own opinion. Although the proposed I-1639 only concerns semi-auto rifles, I think it's causing people to have reservations in general about buying more guns.
One of the more onerous provisions of I-1639 is that it will require a mandatory 10 day waiting period for transfer of any semi-automatic rifle. No exemption for concealed permit holders as there is for handguns. This probably wouldn't sound like such a big deal to a non-gun person. But for someone thinking about buying such a rifle at a gun show, it might be a deal breaker. They might not want to mess around with having to make a second trip to somewhere ten days after the show is over to pick up their purchase.
Once in the hall at the fairgrounds, used to be aisles were so crowded at this show that you had to kinda crab-walk from side to side to get through. No crowding at the show today, pretty easy passage through the aisles. Mostly same old crowd of geriatric old buggers such as myself, not all that much new blood in sight. And that's part of the problem nation-wide. People all crowded up in cities, no place to shoot, faces stuck in electronic diversions; young people are falling away from guns.
These days sales at WAC shows are inhibited by the legal requirement to run a private sale through an FFL dealer. The show management tries to facilitate this, but going through the process can be slow. Some guys are stuck in the old days, just won't buy a gun on paper. If the NICS computers go down (as sometimes happens), the sales cannot be processed and mostly fall through. People don't want to have to drive around unnecessarily to complete the sale.
A more recent political development in WA is having a stifling effect, in my own opinion. Although the proposed I-1639 only concerns semi-auto rifles, I think it's causing people to have reservations in general about buying more guns.
One of the more onerous provisions of I-1639 is that it will require a mandatory 10 day waiting period for transfer of any semi-automatic rifle. No exemption for concealed permit holders as there is for handguns. This probably wouldn't sound like such a big deal to a non-gun person. But for someone thinking about buying such a rifle at a gun show, it might be a deal breaker. They might not want to mess around with having to make a second trip to somewhere ten days after the show is over to pick up their purchase.