We have SHOT Show at home.
I have attended DSEI in London on a couple of occasions (which is purely for gov stuff), but I’ve been meaning to attend the Shooting Show in Birmingham for many, many years, and I finally had a clear opportunity to attend.
The GBSS is a 3 day event and as many of you will be able to imagine it’s at fairly small scale. Just the one hall and even that is barely 1/4 the size of the main hall at SHOT, but overall I found it a very pleasant experience and generally had a far more relaxing time than I’ve ever had in Vegas.
Realistically it could probably be named the ‘British country hunting show’ as the majority of the stands consist of long shotguns, bolt action rifles, very fancy scopes with 3x minimum, air guns and outdoor clothing all in the same shade of dark green. There’s also quite a lot of food and drink vendors, knives, pet supplies and ammunition/reloading. There is a tiny amount of military type apparel/camo, competition type firearms, airsoft and generally tactical stuff. I wouldn’t recommend travelling far if those things are your bag, however if you want to rub shoulders with the real life landed-gentry then it is the place to be.
That said I still had a very good time overall. As mentioned it is smaller than SHOT, IWA or DSEI but it’s definitely far quieter and less crammed than SHOT, and frankly it smells far nicer and the average BMI is far lower. It was a good crowd, as they say. You can also buy just about everything on display right there in the show and many stands had product stock to hand.
Tickets cost about £30 and I believe usually with events at the NEC you pay more to park, but that’s included at the Shooting show. There are tons of food outlets both inside and outside the show hall and I saw minimal queues, and of course I still managed to bump in to a couple of mates of mine, so overall I’d say it makes for a very good little day out.
As mentioned there is very little in the way of military or tactical type equipment, hardly anything even aimed at competition, so if there were any new products announced at the show I’d be pretty certain they weren’t anything with which I would be familiar. The following is purely a gallery of the brand names that I saw and recognised myself and a few of the displays that suited my personal interests.
A high point of the British Shooting Show; I was able to sit down for a short talk with Dave Walls of Accuracy International and hear a few tales about the start of the company and specifically about their prototype of a self-loading .50 rifle, which was named the AS50. There were a couple of illuminating pieces of information which I’ve not heard so far in the existing YouTube video discussions of the topics.
In the beginning, the rifle that gained the fledging form of AI so much attention from the MoD was a single-shot used to win medals in top sporting competition. The government wanted the level of precision that the AI rifle was able to offer, and given that the L96 replaced the L42 (a Lee-Enfield rifle), I would imagine there weren’t many options in the UK at the time for a top quality design that could be used as a sniper’s rifle.
According to Mr Walls; since the design was deemed to be the best available, the MoD set up him up with an already established manufacturing facility once they won the contract. Which rather contradicts the ‘two men in a shed who tricked some officers in to believing they could produce in quantity’ story that is currently out there.
On the topic of the AS50, I would first recommend the video with Jonathan Ferguson that goes over the prototype that is in the Royal Armouries’ Collection, he shows the rifle itself in detail and field strips it on video. It is a true DI design, it’s heavy and has a monster of a recoil buffer, so I’d bet the recoil would quite probably be less than on a Barrett.
The original owners of AI (including Mr Walls) sold the company in 2002, but re-purchased it in 2005. The interim owners drew huge salaries and basically bled the business almost dry; sounds a bit like what happened to some of the biggest names in the US through the 2010s perhaps? This is relevant as the AS50 was being looked at during this period for potential purchase by the US Navy. The problem was that AI didn’t have the requisite assets for relevant desired ‘hospitality’ that was asked for by the interested party at the time, on account of the interim owners’ excessive financial drain. Hence the rifle was not tested or adopted.
As you’ll see in Mr Ferguson’s video, the AS50 is a single stack design which limits the magazine capacity. The MoD was somewhat interested after the USN withdrew, but the UK wanted the same capacity as a comparable competitor; say a 10rnd mag like a Barrett. This would have required a total redesign of the receiver and other parts and AI was already selling bolt-actions as fast as they could make them, so sadly the design was shelved indefinitely. A very interesting story to hear I can say that.
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