Welcome to Las Vegas! The SHOT Show got underway today, the annual convention of gun dealers, manufacturers, distributors, importers, exporters and anyone remotely connected to the firearms trade. There will be about 40,000 of us descending on the town that Obama reviled for its excess.

To which I have two words to say to that: Bring it!

Even though the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoors Trade (SHOT) Show officially began today, yesterday was a must-attend day for journalists and other writers as dozens of manufacturers hosted Media Day. Beginning at 8 a.m. and running right through until, well, whoever is last to leave one of the several parties hosted by various companies.

I started the day at the Browning/Winchester event held at the Desert Sportsman’s Club, a shooting range in the foothills west of Vegas. There were rifle, shotgun and pistol ranges with Browning and Winchester long guns on the former two and Taurus handguns on the latter. New Bushnell riflescopes with bullet-drop reticles adorned all of the Z-Bolts and other rifles.

For reasons I’ve never understood, every year sees the birth of a new shotgun. You’d think that smoothbores are just fine the way they are, but clearly you wouldn’t think that if you were in the marketing department of a shotgun company because a “new and improved” model is annually springing forth. I’ve lost track of how many iterations there are of Browning’s legendary Citori.

I tried a sporting clays 20 ga. O/U with what I can only describe as curiously long barrels. I thought 30-inch barrels were overly long, but then came 32-inch tubes and I wouldn’t be surprised if this soon year there aren’t 34-inch stack-barrels.

Leaving there, I drove with my two buddies, Brad and Paul, over to Nellis Air Force Base for the most coveted of the various media events, the one hosted by FN.

After a thorough safety brief, the gathered media members, some 60 in all, decamped for the ranges. Paul and I made a bee-line for the machinegun range. FN had M240 Bravos, SAWs and their new 40 mike-mike grenade launcher for us to try.

“Only two rounds of 40 mike-mike apiece,” the range officer said. “Those babies are expensive.”

Paul fired an M240 Bravo, our standard-issue 7.62mm light machinegun. He had never fired a belt-fed before, so he was stoked. We both shot the grenade launcher. It was cool to watch the “practice” grenades arc toward the target (a hill). You could easily see the round in flight. The recoil was pronounced, but not painful.

My friend Brad wanted to shoot a quick and dirty three-gun match on one of the ranges. You started with a SCAR Light and engaged three bowling pins at 30 yards, set the gun down (safely) then ran to a waiting shotgun, engaged six targets at 10 yards and then sprinted for a 9 mm FN pistol and fired eight rounds at four targets. Brad ran it in 31 seconds. I was slower at 37 seconds.

Later that night at FN’s party, Brad won the grand prize in the raffle, a SCAR Light, and I won a P90 for placing smack-dab in the 50 percentile of the three-gun shoot.

“I shot a better score and you won a gun,” Brad groused good-naturedly. “What’s up with that?”

I ended the day at a media party hosted by Zeiss. I got home at midnight, a 16-hour day of shooting and schmoozing. Not bad for a first day at the SHOT Show.