Gun Shows Are Hot in Florida

Mike Vogel | 2/1/2009

“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]

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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.”