NRA Annual Meeting Attendance

Stephen Gutowski of The Reload has a tweet up with the official attendance.

The NRA claims they had 61,254 people attend the Annual meeting this week. There are 62 of the 76 board members at the board meeting, according to a source who was in the meeting.

— Stephen Gutowski (@StephenGutowski) May 30, 2022

With all due respect, I think the key word in Stephen’s tweet is “claims”. I have been to every NRA Annual Meeting that has had an exposition since Charlotte in 2010. This had the least people by far. Friday had really light attendance. It picked up on Saturday as one would expect and was so-so on Sunday. I never had trouble walking the aisles of the George Brown Convention Center on any day. I never got pulled along with the crowd nor blocked at intersections. Every vendor I asked about business said it was slow.

I have attended numerous SHOT Shows where the attendance is in the 60-70,000 range and they all seemed more crowded than this show.

As I said in the comments section in a reply to Old NFO, I saw a lot less of “new media” than in the past. There were a few podcasters, a handful of the professional gun press, and very few of the bloggers I’ve gotten to know over the years. There really were not that many of the mainstream media for that matter. I did have some fun conversations with Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the LA Times and Andrew Schneider of Houston Public Radio.

I did not get the chance to attend any of the seminars or workshops. There were some by historian Martin K. A. Morgan that I would have liked to hear. I believe he did ones on the weapons in the Battle of Hue as well as in the Russo-Ukranian war.