Some Surprises At The Gun Show Today

Some Surprises At The Gun Show Today

I used to attend gun shows with some regularity, long, long ago. Not so much the last ten years. This is the first one that I have attended since Gun Salesman of the Year was elected--and what a change! There was actually a line to get in--and the place was so busy that it was difficult to get through the aisles without bumping into people. Ammunition was far more expensive than I remember it, from the last time that I was buying any large quantities.

One of the surprises is that I have always assumed that not terribly many people read this blog, since the SiteMeter down in the lower left corner suggests that I only get about 1000-1100 readers a day, worldwide. Yet an employee of the gun shop running the food drive/rifle raffle I mentioned a couple of weeks back, tells me that after I mentioned this on my blog, he estimated that about half a ton of food was donated by people identifying me as the source of their knowledge that Alpha Omega was doing this.

There has long been some question as to how accurately SiteMeter measures hits--with some reason to think that it underestimates low end operations, and overestimates high end operations. If my single mention of a rifle raffle can cause half a ton of food to be donated here in the Boise area, this suggests to me that I'm getting a lot more than 1100 readers a day worldwide. Wow! Thanks! (I must learn to use my power for good, not for evil!)

Another nice aspect to visiting a gun show is that you get a chance to look at a wider range of optics than you might find in a single gun store--or even several gun stores. I looked through the Barska 6-24x50mm scope--and I'm afraid that I wasn't impressed with the crispness of the image above about 20x. (Admittedly, as magnification goes up, the minimum distance that you can focus on declines--but even looking outside I wasn't impressed.)

I also had a chance to look through the Eagle Eye scopes, which if I believe this, use Czech made optics (although it doesn't say where the rest of the riflescope is made). One of them was a 10-40x50mm. Yes, that's right: 40 magnification, and while not as crisp at 40x as it was at 10x, it was still pretty surprising how good it was.

I also looked through some NCStar riflescopes--and one of the tactical scopes, a 6-24x50mm almost made me cough up the money (it was $160). The optics were really impressively sharp, even at the maximum power. Unfortunately, the dealer didn't have the 4-16x50mm in stock.

I had a chance to talk to someone with some knowledge of how the different scopes are made, and more importantly, who wasn't trying to sell me anything. He told me that many riflescopes use a screw and a spring to position the reticle. The screw moves the recticle in tension against the spring. The very best riflescopes, such as the Zeiss and Leupold, use two screws, apparently moving together, and are therefore much more repeatable. I confess, it has been long enough since I shot a rifle that I may not yet be a position to need optics that well made!