The thing that surprised me most...

...at the gun show was the almost complete absence of .22LR.

The ND 1500 (Thanks for that bit of cleverness, Bobbi!) has a half-dozen or so large ammo sellers that set up every show, and despite the generator-after-a-hurricane pricing on deuce-deuce ammo, by today there wasn't anything left but specialty rounds: shorts, Super Colibris, Eley Tenex match stuff, and the like.

Another interesting feature was how obvious is was that gun safes were getting cleaned out. A lot of guys I visit at every show, collectors who normally have nothing but antique Smiths or rows of old military surplus turnbolts, had their usual content and then, looking incongruous among the Krags and Lugers and top-break S&Ws would be the odd TEC-9 or Green Label Colt AR ("Unfired In The Box!") or MAK-90 that had been gathering dust in the corner of a safe since the panic of the early '90s.

There were plenty of ARs, but pricing was pretty optimistic; most of the ones I saw there yesterday morning were still there this afternoon.

One of the most interesting things was the big dealer who sets up in the front corner of the exhibit hall, pretty much where everybody starts their wend through the aisles, who didn't bring any guns this time, but instead set big boxes of assorted magazines on his table and issued one of his employees a bullhorn, through which she steadily intoned "PMags, thirty-five dollars! Magpul PMags in stock, thirty-five dollars!" Deeper into the exhibit hall were one or two dealers who had stashes of PMags on their tables marked at forty or fifty dollars or even more, not stopping to think that the guy up in the front corner had effectively set the price ceiling for the show. (Conversely, when I saw some for thirty bucks, my subconscious immediately thought "Wow, that's a good price!" before I reminded it that I already have enough PMags to outfit an infantry company...)

As much as I hate the mandated coonfingering of carry guns before entering and after leaving, I also hate the fact that inside the show I get muzzled more times than the Chinese dissident press. As a further aside, when I unload on arrival or gas up my heater after leaving the show, I always go to a brick wall well away from the entrance with nobody else standing around to catch brick chips if I screw up. You would think that in all the gun shows I've been to over the years, I would have had to wait for someone using the same backstop, or turned around to find someone waiting for me to finish using it, and yet I never have...