Posts about how hard your humble scribes work to bring you the latest and greatest gun industry news are invariably boring and self-serving. Why should the average member of the Armed Intelligentsia give a rat’s ass how long or cold a day it was in Boulder City, NV today? You just want to know what’s cool and current, hold the extraneous BS, please. Normally we’d skip all that horse hockey and dish the news about what we saw at the SHOT Show’s ballistic bacchanalia (a.k.a., Media Day at the Range). But this year’s conditions were anything but normal for southern Nevada . . .
Boarding the first bus headed for the range this A.M., we knew we were in for frosty conditions and had dutifully layered up. Instead of the usual average high of somewhere in the mid 50s this time of year, we enjoyed temps in the low 20s. But it was the constant 15-20 mph mistral ripping through the NSSF’s best laid plans that really made trudging from booth to booth the uniquely enjoyable experience that it was today.
This was the scene all day long around the only working heater in one of the two chow tents as media members and manufacturers there to man their booths instead snuck any chance they could take for a break from the arctic gusts.
But even with occasional respites from the icy winds blowing down from Mordor, the conditions proved to be too much for some — and one of them was RF.
That’s him, above, seated in an ambulance being monitored and ministered to by an EMT after developing a case of the shakes that made the Loma Prieta quake feel like a speed bump. Even his hearty nor’eastern upbringing wasn’t enough to ward off a case of desert-induced hypothermia. Maybe I should have told him to remove his badge to prevent asphyxiation . . .
But enough about human frailty. We’re made of tougher stuff than that. We went there knowing full well we’d be muzzled (and were we ever) and figuring we’d freeze. And now that we’re back in our toasty hotel room with our core temperatures steadily on the rise, keep refreshing for news of some of the best schtuff we’ve seen so far.