The Gun Industry Heads to Vegas — Here’s What You Need to Know about the SHOT Show 

Today, the gun industry landed in Las Vegas for the annual Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show, the largest trade show of its kind for gun makers and sellers, which is put on by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) and held just 2 miles from the site of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The SHOT Show provides “13.9 miles of aisles” for gun makers to display new assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and other gun industry innovations that make mass shootings like the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting even deadlier. It’s also an opportunity for gun companies to celebrate with “SHOT After Dark” mixers and parties.

The SHOT Show is also a major revenue source for the NSSF, which outspends every other gun group on federal lobbying.

“As communities across the country suffer the consequences of our gun violence epidemic, the gun industry continues to innovate towards danger — consistently refusing to take basic steps to make their products and practices safer,” said Nick Suplina, SVP of Law and Policy at Everytown for Gun Safety. “The NSSF’s first priority is boosting gun industry profits, even if it comes at the cost of human lives. As the gun industry parties in Las Vegas — as if the deadliest mass shooting in modern history didn’t occur down the street — we’ll keep fighting to dismantle the ‘guns everywhere’ culture they’ve perpetuated.”

“For the NSSF to host SHOT Show in Las Vegas is beyond tone-deaf — it’s ​retraumatizing to​ the survivors, victims’ families, and community ​that is still carrying the scars of that horrific night,” said Geena Marano Springmann, a survivor of the mass shooting at Route 91 Harvest and Moms Demand Action volunteer. “They’re here to celebrate profits while survivors in Vegas and beyond are left to live with the heartbreak. Until ​t​he gun industry starts taking accountability for the devastation it leaves in its wake, its actions will remain a cruel insult to those of us who have lived through its consequences.”

Here’s what you need to know about the SHOT Show:

• The SHOT Show is a closed-door event open only to exhibitors, potential customers who buy in bulk — including gun wholesalers, retailers, and military and law enforcement personnel — and media outlets that regularly cover firearms.

• New products unveiled at SHOT Show in recent years include Wee1 Tactical’s “JR-15,” an AR-15 scaled-down for children. The founders of Wee 1 Tactical have since formed a new company to bring a scaled-down AR-15 to market and to return to the 2025 SHOT Show.
  
• Several devastating, high-profile mass shootings were carried out with assault weapons made by NSSF members and SHOT Show exhibitors, including:

• Several of the weapons recovered after the 2017 Las Vegas shooting;
• The Daniel Defense AR-15 used in the 2022 Uvalde shooting;
• The Sig Sauer MCX used in the 2016 Orlando shooting; and 
• The Smith & Wesson AR-15 used in the 2022 Highland Park shooting, the 2012 Aurora theater shooting, the 2018 Parkland High School shooting, and the 2015 San Bernardino shooting.

• With over 2,800 exhibitors, the 2025 SHOT Show will showcase more assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, silencers, rapid-fire triggers, and other deadly firearm innovations than in previous years.

• The organization that fights the hardest to prevent the firearms industry from being held accountable for its role in endangering the public is the same one that sponsors the SHOT Show: The NSSF, which derives over 75 percent of its revenue from the show itself.

• While the National Rifle Association remains mired in scandal and legal troubles, the NSSF has tried to fill the void and is increasingly influential in the halls of Congress and statehouses across the country. The NSSF isn’t as well known as the NRA, but it shares many of the same goals, is just as extreme, and exacerbates our gun violence epidemic.

Last year, Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, in partnership with Students Demand Action, launched Are You Good With That? — a campaign to educate people about the gun industry’s role in America’s gun violence crisis. Are You Good With That? takes the fight right to the greedy gunmakers, dishonest marketers, and rogue gun sellers that profit off of the sale of guns and the harm they cause.

For more information about the role the gun industry plays in contributing to our gun violence crisis, visit Everytown’s award winning website The Smoking Gun at www.smokinggun.org. 

To speak with an Everytown expert, please contact [email protected].