“What impressed me by the shows in Florida,” says Garen Wintemute, a California professor who studies gun shows, “was how many weapons there were that had lots of street utility and street cred.” Victor Bean stages 36 gun shows a year in Florida, including this one in Jacksonville. His target demographic: 25- to 54-year-old men. [Photo: Kelly LaDuke]

The Promoter

2010 AABP Award of Excellence Winner: "Bucks for the Bang" - Best Cover (February 2009 Issue), Best Feature (Mike Vogel writer)

Miami — It was a tough day for Victor Bean. Typically, a weekend in September would find 3,300 people at his Victor Bean Southern Classic Gun and Knife Show in Miami. But the threat of a hurricane had people in line at Home Depot and Publix, making for a very slow day for Bean, a friendly 49 year old. “When things are slow, we joke, ‘Where’s Bill Clinton when you need him?’ ”

Many a true word spoken in jest. Two months later, Barack Obama won the presidency, and fears that he will renew Clinton era gun-control efforts had weapon sales booming. “The shows are so crowded we can’t get people in,” a harried Bean said in December. His Fort Walton show usually tops out at 2,800 attendees in a weekend but hit 5,100 this time, Bean says. “I’m adding on shows and getting more space to get the people in. The dealers are doing really good.

Gun shows are a Bean family business; collectively, Beans stage 120 a year. Victor’s father, Ernie, the first in the business, holds Louisiana’s largest show, in New Orleans, and also stages shows in Alabama and Mississippi. Victor’s brother, Todd, dominates Texas. Sister Sondra works Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

PHOTOS Bucks for the Bang Take a visit to the Southern Classic Gun and Knife Show in Jacksonville: See gallery

With 36 shows — three added post-Obama — Victor Bean is one of the two biggest operators in Florida, where nearly every weekend gun store owners and private parties gather in some city to buy and sell firearms. Even so, it’s a small business. Bean and one full-time employee rent the venue. A team of temps helps set up the tables, and Bean hires 24-hour security. The business has given him some clout: His e-mail list tops more than 100,000 names, making him and his shows a sought-after stop for politicians.

Bean knows the business inside-out. His target demographic is 25- to 54-year-old males. TV ads pull best but cost the most. Newspaper ads pull the best per dollar. Insurance has risen to $41,000 a year from $6,000 a decade ago.

Orlando is Bean’s largest show, which he runs under the Florida Gun Show name. That show features 600 vendor tables; an average of 6,000 potential customers pay to attend. At $9 a ticket for visitors and $85 a table from vendors, Orlando brings in about $100,000 — against Bean’s average expense of $60,000 to $70,000 per show.

Nationally, the last authoritative count totaled more than 4,000 gun shows a year. With around 200 shows a year, Florida ranks third, behind Texas and Pennsylvania, by one count. Operators like Bean work the same cities, staging a show in a location every few months. In the post-Clinton era, profits had grown so thin that even Florida’s largest metros — West Palm Beach, Fort Myers, Tampa, Orlando, Miami — generally sustained only one gun show operator.

The shows tend to reflect their respective area’s demographics and the particular firearms interests of its inhabitants. The Miami show, for example, draws a far more diverse and younger clientele — many Spanish speakers, far more African-Americans — than other shows in south Florida. One typical scene featured two men with waist-length dreadlocks strolling down an aisle as, nearby, two South Beach-slender young women tried to explain the nuances of a handgun to their befuddled father. One daughter deftly snapped back the slide on a handgun to demonstrate the action for him.

Victor Bean is one of the two biggest gun show operators in Florida. The election of President Barack Obama, Bean says, is still driving assault rifle sales and prices skyward. [Photo: Kelly LaDuke]

At the Miami show, Bean walked the aisles past handguns and assault rifles, used and new, by the hundreds. Boxes labeled in Cyrillic alphabet held new Russian-made Saiga 12 semi-auto combat shotguns. There were bumper stickers: “Keep Honking I’m Reloading” and “100% Fact Free” with Obama’s picture. Booksellers had tomes on military history and a copy of the racist “The Turner Diaries” and the explosives-recipe “The Anarchist Cookbook” — books frequently seen at gun shows. There was also “Voices from the Camps,” a sympathetic account of Japanese-Americans interred by the Roosevelt administration in the American West during World War II.

“What impressed me by the shows in Florida was how many weapons there were that had lots of street utility and street cred,” says Garen Wintemute, who studies gun shows as an emergency medicine professor at the University of California Davis Medical Center and directs its violence prevention research program.

The Miami market in particular isn’t geared toward hunters. Some sellers like to call it a self-defense and target-shooting market, or a “concealable and tactical” market. “Thank Bill Clinton for that,” Bean says. A 1994 to 2004 ban on sales of some types of assault rifles drove up prices and demand for grandfathered weapons, he says. “It used to be you might have had two AK-47s in the whole show and everybody considered them junk. You didn’t see many AR-15 rifles. The shows were really cool. You would see old World War II collectibles. Now it’s all gone to high-capacity handguns and military-style rifles.”

Months after the election, the Obama effect is still driving assault rifle sales and prices skyward, Bean reports. At his recent Fort Walton show, a dealer sold out five tables of assault rifles in just two hours after the doors opened, he says. “This is like Clinton-squared.”

Khaled Akkawi is said to be the biggest gun seller in the nation, selling 50,000 to 70,000 a year. His gun show displays are so large that he uses a Segway to get around. [Photo: Kelly LaDuke]

The Volume Dealer

Miami — Zipping around the Miami gun show on his Segway, Khaled Akkawi, the stern-faced owner of Shoot Straight Sports, makes for an imposing figure. Akkawi operates what is said to be the highest volume gun seller in the nation, selling 50,000 to 70,000 guns a year. The Lebanese immigrant has sold at gun shows for 28 years and has stores in Casselberry, Apopka and Tampa. Two more open this year in Fort Myers and Lakeland.

In an industry of small, crusty retailers, 120-employee Shoot Straight is the category-killer. Akkawi and his clean-cut staff wear khaki shirt uniforms. His major stores, including gun ranges, are larger than the average Office Depot. His three rows of tables at Miami are triple the table space operated by other large dealers, with the end of one row devoted entirely to processing payments — and running customers through required background checks.

Akkawi carries a broad assortment of firearms — “if they make it, we carry it” — but handguns make up three-quarters of his sales. He won’t disclose revenue. But retail margins on used weapons run 30%; on new, 15%, he says.

Akkawi tries to play by the rules. Some men who don’t want to undergo a background check try to hide purchases by bringing a woman to the show as a surrogate buyer. California professor and gun show researcher Garen Wintemute saw a Shoot Straight worker — perhaps Akkawi himself — approach one such woman and quiz her about her gun choice. The woman, clueless about the weapon, and her male companion were loudly driven away. It was the first time, Wintemute says, he’s seen someone “blow up a straw purchase.”

Why the Segway? Akkawi rents 80 tables at some shows, totaling 640 linear feet of display space.

“If you try to walk that, halfway through the day you’ll give out,” Akkawi says.

The Consumers

For gun buyers, the draw is a vast selection, price and negotiable prices, says show promoter Bill Page. Large dealers can sell 500 to 600 guns a show, he says. [Photo: Kelly LaDuke]

West Palm Beach — Gun show operator Bill Page turns to the crowd at his gun show at the South Florida Fairgrounds in West Palm Beach and asks a question that he answers himself: “Who do you see here? Middle America.”

The aisles indeed are filled with seniors, parents pushing kids in strollers and Average Joes. As if on cue, an elderly fellow in a motorized wheelchair rolls by, a rifle propped on the footboard. And, reflecting the biggest change in Page’s decades in the business, there are plenty of women who’ve come to buy and sell. Women comprise 16% of Florida’s concealed weapons licensees. Says the shirt on one lady, “If you can read this, you’re in range.”

Page says his Melbourne-based Sport Show Specialists saw attendance rise 12% last year, following gains of 8% and 10% in the two prior years. For buyers, the draw is a vast selection, price and negotiable prices, Page says. Large dealers can sell 500 to 600 guns a show, he says.

After more than 40 years in the business, Page ought to know. The 66-year-old has an outdoorsman’s piercing eyes. He’s hunted in British Columbia and Zimbabwe. He owns 15 submachine guns, machine guns and sniper rifles and has a ready answer as to why. “Who buys a Corvette that has 650 horse when the speed limit’s 70? Everybody has something they enjoy doing.” He reckons he buys 400 billboards a year to promote his 26 shows.

Like at all gun shows, a big draw is the concealed weapons permit class. “CONCEALED WEAPONS PERMIT CO RSE AT SHOW,” reads a sign with a missing letter on a worn truck outside. Attendance boomed after law enforcement disintegrated in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. On a Saturday morning, 81 people — one in 10 of them women — go through a class put on by Hollywood-based IPS. Walter Philbrick, a judo champion and retired police officer, says his company has taught 150,000 people in the past 15 years.

Bill Page stages 26 gun shows a year. “Who do you see here? Middle America.” [Photo: Florida Today Archive]

On the show floor, the crowd is mostly white. Two big boar heads near the entrance testify to this show being more hunter-oriented than shows to the south. Filling out the 500 tables are one with “I Love Lucy” memorabilia and one provided, gratis, to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, where plastic gun locks and brochures on responsible handling of firearms are given away. Another nuance of difference in this show: More people come to the show with personal guns to trade or sell, like the man with a rifle slung over his shoulder tagged with “Russian SKS — $345.”

For many, the show is just entertainment. Two men stop at a table to admire a custom-made rifle with a gleaming stock and intricate inlaid design. Says the seller behind the table, “It’s a work of art — like a Picasso.”

[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.”

Loopholes?

Gun shows draw controversy because of the so-called “gun show loophole,” a belief that gun buyers at shows aren’t subject to background checks and that sellers are free from government-required record keeping.

Florida’s Gun Restrictions » Buyers must be 18 to purchase a long-barreled firearm and 21 to purchase a handgun. » The waiting period — which doesn’t apply to concealed weapons permit carriers — is three days or five days, depending on the county. » Many large urban counties such as Miami-Dade and Orange require that private sellers check out the background of buyers, usually by paying a licensed dealer to run a background check.

“There is no gun show loophole,” says promoter Bill Page. He’s right in the sense that what’s legal or illegal at a gun show is legal or illegal in the larger market. Licensed dealers — who make up most of Florida gun show sellers — conduct the same background checks and record keeping at gun shows that they do in their stores. (The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which takes calls every day but Christmas and New Year’s, doesn’t track gun show checks compared to store checks. It has run 3.5 million checks on purchasers overall since 1997.)

The issue for gun control advocates is gun show private sellers, defined by federal law as people who aren’t “engaged in the business.” They can sell without running background checks, whether at gun shows or through classified ads or yard sales. Some are hobbyists, for whom the exemption was created, but others are just unlicensed gun dealers taking advantage. In either case, “the No. 1 problem with gun shows is sales without checks,” says attorney Brian Siebel of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Advocates for more regulation say gun shows are “hot spots” offering criminals easy access to a range of private sellers and dealers who can be hoodwinked by surrogate purchasers, called straw purchasers, or who simply are indifferent. Supporters and detractors of shows each have data to back them. For control advocates, a government study estimated that 31% of all trafficked guns in the nation came through gun shows and flea markets. At shows, the study found, private sellers, corrupt licensed dealers and dealers selling to straw purchasers sold firearms — from pistols to machine guns — to people who shouldn’t have them.

But a 2000 ATF study found that criminals are much more likely to simply steal weapons than buy them at gun shows and flea markets. Most armed criminals carry stolen guns; only 2% of inmates locked up on gun-related charges got their weapon at a gun show, according to one study.

A student of gun shows, California professor Garen Wintemute surreptitiously visited more than 70 guns shows across the country. He observed anonymous transfers through “private sellers” and obvious straw purchases. In Tampa, he watched as a man selected an SKS assault rifle with a bayonet and a 30-round magazine at a licensed dealer. The man then moved about 15 feet away while a female friend completed the paperwork and background check. The man asked the dealer about the appropriate case for it and ammo while the processing went on and then, when the deal closed, took possession and picked out a case and ammo.

The most expensive guns at south Florida shows can usually be found at Vito Servideo’s tables. His Pompano Beach store (above) sells machine guns and grenade launchers. [Photo: Aaron Ansarov]

The Specialist

Vito Servideo’s Only The Best Firearms holds the distinction at south Florida gun shows of having the most expensive merchandise on the floor. He has hundreds of high-priced weapons in locked display cases, the most expensive a $20,000 German-made Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun. He has a Minimi machine gun at his store that sells for $75,000.

A collector himself before opening his Pompano Beach business eight years ago, Servideo has a Class III federal dealer’s license, allowing him to trade in machine guns, silencers, grenade launchers, destructive devices and other, as his website says, “investment grade firearms.”

Buying machine guns generally isn’t fast, easy or cheap. Only weapons registered before a 1986 law are allowed to be bought and sold. Scarcity drives prices up. There’s a $200 federal transfer tax. In addition to a fingerprint check, the buyer’s local chief law enforcement officer — typically, a sheriff or police chief — has to sign off that there’s no known reason against the buyer owning one. Some law officers won’t sign off for anyone.

Servideo’s inventory includes higher end conventional firearms and storied weapons like the Thompson submachine gun, the Browning Automatic Rifle and the Grease Gun. “Most of the stuff we sell is expensive and rare. We sell the normal stuff just to pay the bills,” he says.

Shows attract seniors, parents with kids and the common man. Gun control advocates say the shows offer criminals easy access to weapons. [Photo: Kelly LaDuke]

Antiques

Pete Fields [Photo: Aaron Ansarov]

After table upon table of handguns and assault rifles that blend into each other, the merchandise on Pete Fields’ table is strikingly eye-catching: An 18th-century palm gun, a $1,494 flintlock pistol and an antique Winchester rifle — “the gun that won the West,” Fields says.

A Palm Beach Gardens antiques dealer, Fields specialized in what’s known as the “smalls” — small antique items — until eBay devastated his niche. So he began dealing in firearms on the government’s “Curio and Relics” list, which encompasses weapons older than 50 years.

It’s not easy to find such merchandise, so Fields also sells semi-automatic assault rifles from former Eastern Bloc countries. He calls in background checks on buyers for those just as other sellers do. But he says he prefers older weapons. His profit on a new firearm can be only $60, and they’re less interesting to him.

With a significant look, he points out four notches carved in the stock of a century-old semi-automatic rifle. Built to hold a 30-round clip, it was a kind used by prison guards. “It fires just as fast as an AK-47. It came out in 1907,” he says.

Concealed Weapon / Firearm License Holders (As of Nov. 30, 2008)
Top Florida Counties	License Holders	Sig Sauer P226 Elite Cost: About $1,000 Beretta 3032 Tomcat Cost: About $400 Beretta M9 U.S. Marine Corps Cost: About $600
Miami-Dade	53,570
Broward	45,638
Palm Beach	36,586
Hillsborough	26,632
Orange	26,337
Duval	23,947
Pinellas	22,951
Lee	19,180
Brevard	17,247
Volusia	16,103
Total Top 10 Counties	288,191
Total in Florida	537,729