Gun Shows Are Hot in Florida

[Photo: Aaron Ansarov]

The Inventory

Fort Lauderdale — The two police officers manning the table on a summer Saturday afternoon at the Suncoast Gun Show at the War Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale don’t have much to do. They’re there to make sure any guns brought in are unloaded and tagged. An odd fact about gun shows: Not more than two in 10 people who attend shows in Florida carry even an unloaded gun.

So the officers mostly just watch as the attendees ($8 per adult, kids free, free admission with renewal of NRA membership) file through the doors and into the tight confines of War Memorial, a small venue for a gun show in a metro as large as Fort Lauderdale. Inside, amid the trade show hum, the crowd inches past hundreds of tables where sellers peddle the likes of Tasers, refrigerator magnets, ammo galore ($80 for 300 rounds of hollow points), laser sights, $25 blow guns, pepper spray, T-shirts honoring everything from Dixie to Bastogne, $5 light sabers, all flavors of jerky, custom gun handgrips and accessories for tricking out a handgun, holsters in all styles. On display is a mannequin torso showing how a handgun can be hidden in a man’s swimsuit. “They’ll never know it’s there,” reads the advertisement.

The draw, though, is the new and used-gun inventory, and there’s plenty — $179 pink Cricket .22-caliber rifles for girls, .50-caliber muzzle-loaders for those with a historical bent, a Romanian AK-47 for $600, and a $209 Beretta, the cheapest handgun in sight.

Suncoast, one of Florida’s largest gun show operators, lists its home as Twinsburg, Ohio, on its website. Government records also have a Jupiter address, with its officers listed as Laurie Townsend and Joseph and Martha Stegh. A woman who answered the phone at the Ohio number says they never speak to reporters.

At War Memorial on a Saturday, the crowd — as in West Palm Beach — is overwhelmingly white; many are tattooed. The customers inch past the “Kill Bill” swords and flails and breeze by the 1960s Army manual on booby traps. The fellows by the Pickelhaube, the pointed Kaiser helmet, at the German and Italian militaria table are just socializing.

Nearly lost in the din, a woman on a PA system is saying something about the Second Amendment. The noise abates just as the woman concludes: “A room full of guns is paradise.”