The Gun Show Is Older Than You Think: From a Backyard to 4,000 Tables

In 1937 a man named Miller Bedford sent out penny-postcard invitations, and thirty-five people turned up in his backyard in New London, Ohio, carrying prized pieces from their collections. That backyard, by the Ohio Gun Collectors Association's own account, is where the club began. The commercial gun show, with its ticket window and its traveling promoter, came decades later. The collectors' meeting is the parent, and some of those parents still hold their own reunions.

A backyard in New London, Ohio

The usual telling makes gun collecting a postwar hobby. Collector's Firearms, a Houston dealer, writes that collecting in the United States "started just after World War II." The Ohio club's chronology starts in 1937, and it grew quickly. In 1949, on its 12th anniversary, the OGCA incorporated as a nonprofit with more than 1,000 members, and its history notes that "annual dues were increased to $1.00 without dissent." Early meetings moved among National Guard armories, fraternal halls, parks and fairgrounds.

The OGCA's About page says the National Rifle Association calls it the "Granddaddy" of all firearm collector associations, and its history page calls it "the world's largest and oldest assembly of firearms collectors." Treat both as the club's description of itself. By its own count, the OGCA has 16,000 members from 49 states and regularly fills 600 to 700 tables "of strictly gun-related material." Its events page lists members-and-guests meetings rotating among Hamilton, Columbus and Wellington.

The format is what matters. The first members brought pieces to show one another, and the club now calls its meetings "a lively and active trading place of firearms." Add a few hundred tables and you have a gun show.

The postwar wave: Maryland, Texas, Tulsa and the Dakotas

Collector's Firearms says almost all of today's collecting clubs formed between the 1950s and the 1970s.

Maryland. Civil War News reports that the Maryland Arms Collectors Association "started in 1947 with a half dozen antique arms collectors discussing the creation of a club." In 1955 the members decided to hold a show "highlighting their collections" at the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore. Note the verb. The stated idea was display, not retail.

Texas. Collector's Firearms dates the Texas Gun Collectors Association to 1950. Star-Telegram photos held by the University of Texas at Arlington show the association concluding a state convention in Fort Worth in September 1951, with about 100 attending. A caption from a few days earlier identifies Burl Stiff, showing off antique arms, as "a founder" of the association.

Oklahoma. Gun Digest and the Tulsa news outlet KRMG both date the Tulsa show to 1955, as a club project of the Indian Territory Gun Collectors Association. KRMG puts it at 19 tables in the old armory building.

The Dakotas. The Dakota Territory Gun Collectors Association has "been in operation since 1961," according to NewsCenter1 in Rapid City, and organizes shows across both states.

There was a national layer, too. The American Society of Arms Collectors says it was founded in 1953 for people interested in "the collection, research, study, and preservation of arms, armor, and accessories and accouterments." Membership is "limited to a maximum of 250 active members," by invitation only, and its meetings include displays and presentations. It is the opposite of a public show, built on the same habit.

How a club show became a family business

Tulsa is a clear example of the handoff from club to company. Joe Wanenmacher told Gun Digest in 2013 that he joined the Indian Territory club in the 1960s, and when the secretary-treasurer left in 1968, "since I was still among the newest and most gullible members, they elected me." The job came with the show.

His first one, he said, had 117 tables, and only he and one other member showed up to set them out. (KRMG's account puts the count at 217.) Within two years it was a 400-table show. Rock Island Auction Company writes that he later "struck a deal to purchase the event and turn it into a family business." By 2013, Wanenmacher told Gun Digest, it ran more than 4,150 tables and drew 83 percent of its visitors from outside Tulsa. KRMG put it at "some 4,000 tables," and Rock Island Auction at "more than 4,000" in 2022.

Rock Island Auction calls it "the largest gun show in the world," and KRMG calls it "the largest of its kind in the world." Rock Island dates the Tulsa Arms Show to 1968; Gun Digest and KRMG say 1955. One counts from the business, the other from the club.

The promoter era goes multi-state

Tulsa became a business by purchase. Others were businesses from the start. Collector's Firearms puts the big shift in the 1980s and 1990s, when "promoters had jumped into the mix who had nothing to do with a collecting club." The record shows some earlier. Crossroads of the West, which runs shows in Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah, marks itself "Est. 1975" and says it drew more than half a million guests in the last year, "more than any other gun show in America." That is the promoter's own claim. In California, a company called Great Western Shows had held shows at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona for 22 years by the fall of 1999, according to the California Supreme Court.

The multi-state circuit is the promoter era's signature. R.K. Shows of Fair Grove, Missouri, lists shows in ten states on its homepage at the time of writing and calls itself "one of the largest Gun and Knife Show promoters in the US." A club serves a membership. A promoter serves a route of rented halls and a roster of vendors paying for tables.

1986: federal law writes the gun show in

The statute that lets licensed dealers do business at a gun show is younger than every club in this story. Subsection 923(j) of Title 18 was added by the Firearms Owners' Protection Act, Public Law 99-308, approved May 19, 1986. It lets a licensed importer, manufacturer or dealer conduct business temporarily at a gun show in the state named on the license. Congress was catching up: a Treasury and Justice Department report says it "codified" an ATF regulation that had allowed the same thing since 1984.

Read the definition and the clubs are right there. ATF's regulation at 27 CFR 478.100 defines a gun show as "a function sponsored by any national, State, or local organization, devoted to the collection, competitive use, or other sporting use of firearms," then adds a clause wide enough to cover an organization that sponsors such functions. What dealers could do before then is covered in how gun show dealers operated before 1984.

Backyards, ballrooms, armories and fairgrounds

Maryland's venue list is the whole arc in one club. Civil War News traces it from the Belvedere to the Lord Baltimore Hotel, the 5th Regiment Armory, the Baltimore Convention Center and, from 1993, the Cow Palace at Timonium, where the 2023 show had more than 900 sales and display tables. Growth pushes a show out of the ballroom and toward the biggest hall in the county. The economics of that last move are covered in why so many gun shows end up at fairgrounds.

The Great Western and the limits of a rented hall

A show that rents a public building depends on its landlord. The California Supreme Court's opinion describes three Great Western shows a year, with sellers of everything from antique and modern firearms to Old West memorabilia. The county owned the fairgrounds and leased them to the Los Angeles County Fair Association.

In 1999 the county supervisors voted 3 to 2 to prohibit the sale of firearms and ammunition on county property. CBS News, which called the Great Western "the nation's largest gun show," reported attendance of more than 100,000 a year. Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who sponsored the measure, framed it as a step for jurisdictions that "want to do something about the proliferation of illegal weaponry." The show's manager, Chad Seger, said it was "putting the Great Western as it exists today out of business." The organizers sued, and in 2002 the California Supreme Court held that state law did not preempt the county's ban on its own property. The court decided who had the authority; whether the ban was good policy was not the question before it.

Military Trader, which remembered the Great Western as "the largest gun show west of the Mississippi," wrote in 2014 that it moved to Las Vegas, "it wasn't the same," and "eventually, it was gone."

The internet era and the stubborn collector meeting

The web took over the job of finding a price, as covered in are gun shows dying. It did not replace the room, the argument in why gun shows still exist. The old clubs are a fair test, because they never depended on bargains. The Dakota Territory association lists eleven shows between October 2026 and April 2027. The Texas association's 2024 fall event combined a show, an auction and display awards. The OGCA fills its halls without admitting the public at all. None of that looks like a format waiting for a eulogy.

A timeline of the American gun show

What this means at the show table

Most shows on the national gun show calendar are open to anyone who pays admission. A collector-association meeting can work differently. Here is how to find one and behave once inside.

1. Read the sponsor's name on the listing. "Gun Collectors Association" or "Arms Collectors" usually means a club, not a promoter.
2. Check the club's own site for access rules. Some club shows are public. The OGCA says its meetings are "closed to the public" and that you must attend "as a guest of one of our current members."
3. Find a sponsor. An OGCA member can invite up to four guests to a meeting, a guest pass is $15 for the weekend at the time of writing, and an individual is limited to five visits per lifetime as a guest.
4. Bring no loaded firearm, including a carry gun. The OGCA requires every firearm to be presented at the Gun Tie Desk and tied, magazines removed. A guest with a loaded gun is banned for life and the sponsoring member is suspended for a year.
5. Learn what the show allows before you bring trade goods. Baltimore enforced its no post-1898 handgun rule in 2014, and the OGCA limits tables to gun-related material.
6. Do not dry fire, handle without asking or block a table. The OGCA's rules prohibit all three, and members answer for their guests.
7. If you want to join, apply in person. The OGCA takes applications at a meeting, guest pass visible, and votes on them at the next one.