NRA Convention 2010

Well, this is the first time since the weekend, that I have had time to sit down and write about the NRA Convention and "THE BREDA BLOGMEET."

The weekend started with me driving down to Virginia to meet up with Newbius at his house. From there, we headed down to Charlotte in his car. Newbius is like me when it comes to driving - we don't want to stop for anything; we just want to get there. So for the next 5 hours in the car, we talked a lot about politics, listened to music. He gave me plenty of food for thought, because I'd like to become more politically active where I live. But I digress.

We finally get down to Charlotte, check into our hotel room and then head out to the convention center, where we would eventually meet up with a bunch of the other gunbloggers.

We're here at the convention hall, outside the Press Room, where we all met up. We spend the rest of the afternoon and evening together, which eventually led to THE BREDA BLOGMEET. At dinner, we were pleasantly surprised by the appearance of Alan Gura, Alan Gottlieb and his wife and Michael Bane. Somewhere along the way, I gave Breda a pack of squid jerky, back at Jay's hotel room, where they were recording Vicious Circle. Everyone partook of it, except Alan, who's allergic, and they all liked it.

Here's (from left to right) SayUncle, Alan Gura and Michael Bane.

The Three Alans - Gottlieb, Andrews and Gura.

Alan Gura and me.

Me, Michael Bane an Alan Gottlieb.

A great time was had by all at dinner. Afterwards, our party moved outside onto the plaza, where Breda was practicing her maternal instincts on the Dixielette:

There truly is something amazingly beautiful about a woman holding a baby.

We hung around outside chatting the night away and before we knew it, it was midnight. So, Newbius and I departed, while Ahab and Ahabette were getting their caricatures drawn on an iPad. It was amazing to watch the artist work the iPad like that. We got back to the hotel room and crashed.

The next day, I milled about the convention center by myself and sat in on Ted Nugent's "show." He was awesome. At one point, he even brought tears to my eyes when he paid homage to the paralyzed Marine sniper by getting him out to his ranch and presenting him with a rifle fitted to him, that he could zero in and fire with an air tube to his mouth. It still chokes me up now when I think about it. Despite his "Motor City Mad Man" persona, I can see that Ted Nugent is a deeply caring and giving person. He's tops in my book.

Afterwards, I made my way back down to the convention hall and went to say "Hi" to Cam Edwards. He was chit-chatting with many other people during a commercial break in his show, but he did pick his head up, saw me and said "Hi" back.

So I wandered around a bit more before meeting back up with my fellow bloggers to go back down to the convention hall, after it closed its doors to the public, so we could all go and appreciate the Hollywood Guns that were being put away to be sent back to the NRA Museum, but not before we got a chance to hold them:

Tom Selleck's Sharps rifle from Quigley: Down Under and John Wayne's rifle from Stagecoach and Rio Lobo.

Me, holding a piece of John Wayne history. Can you tell I'm absolutely giddy??

The Sharps rifle. That gun was heavy!

A fellow blogger had his hand at it too.

Alan with the tricked out .500 S&W from Samuel L. Jackson's The Spirit movie.

Breda with the suppressed shotgun from No Country For Old Men.

Jay with Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum. And to round things up, here's a shot of the gang:

Then we all got kicked out (not really) and went to get some beers and tried to finish Vicious Circle, but the traffic noise was drowning us out. So we moved into the empty lobby of the Wachovia Bank building and we finished the last hour-and-a-half of the show. Then we all packed it in and sadly parted ways.

And that's all, folks. Next year: Pittsburgh! Can't wait.