Not Your Father's Gun Show

Back when I was just a freelance Night & Day writer for your Miami New Times, I wrote this weird cap for Victor Bean's Southern Classic Gun & Knife Show. Somehow I wrote things like "Firing an AK-47 at Italian marble in order to create relief sculptures is all the rage in Wynwood," but Victor Bean's gun shows aren't booming because the artsy crowd took my satire seriously, no, as you've read in a million trend pieces since November the gun business is booming and it's thanks to Obama. Yadda. Yadda. Yadda.

The far more interesting part of Florida Trend's profile of Victor Bean is the crowd his Miami shows attract.

"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....
...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.

Yeah, I'm sure these guns are used for "target-shooting." Gee, just last week I stopped by the shooting range on Ocean Drive and joined all these slender young women firing handguns, for sport and fun.