Pennsylvania Gun Show
Philadelphia Expo Center
100 Station Ave.
Oaks, Pennsylvania
Feb. 8, 2025
“Are you here for the cat show?”
I didn’t know an international kitten competition was going down next door until a ticket taker for a concurrent gun show staged inside the Philadelphia Expo Center profiled me upon entry.
I had come for gunfire, not meows.
I showed up Saturday to what was billed as a "family friendly” "Eagles Show" — Pennsylvania’s largest firearm exhibition — with only my bisexual, socialist roommate in tow.
Guns are, obviously, a loaded cultural touchstone. The range of Americans picking up guns is growing; it seems somewhat intuitive to me that as mainstream culture crumbles, more individuals are aiming to reconcile their relationships with these increasingly available and accessible objects of power. The ubiquity of school and street shootings alongside casual violence on screen extends the nuanced nature of our fights for and against firearms onto children's plates. The evolution of variant gun cultures is a family affair.
So I brought my own modern family of two to check out the scene unfurling just outside our city limits. It hoped it would be about fun just as much as self-defense.
Thousands of people flooded the expo center over the weekend for the show, primarily to restock on cheap ammo for handguns as well as to browse and in some cases make illegal purchases. The most common purchase, vendors informed us, were bullpup firearms because “they’re tactical, attractive for home defense, and fun to shoot on a hunting range.”
The metallic atmosphere inside the three-room warehouse trilled with tasers and perfumed a mushroom cloud of sweet jerky. Cured animal parts were everywhere. Fur beer koozies shrouded Celsius energy drinks in unwanted warmth while their pelted counterparts hung dejectedly from overstuffed clothing racks. I remembered the event branded as “family furr-iendly” taking place just one warehouse over. Here at the advertised “family fun” gun show were tables lined with pepper spray; samurai swords; flails; knives; bullets; muskets; handguns; assault rifles.
“Will you girls just be careful? I’m out of band-aids,” one vendor cracked as we walked by his booth. “Something pretty for you guys to look at, finally,” another cooed when we passed a jewelry pop-up.
It didn’t take long to stumble upon another widely proffered category of purchase: Nazi memorabilia. The exhibition’s token bookseller hoarded racks on racks of literature bespelling the Nazi cause. One man asserted that a styrofoam Hitler was “for sale — not for photos,” and asked us for $45. At another stand I spotted coins with swastikas printed on them, then a collection of stamps featuring Hitler's profile and looked up questioningly at the seller: “I like to collect fun stuff,” he told me.
Right — "fun." I was reporting on “family fun day.” I asked some kids and their corresponding adults about how the field trip was going.
A second grader named Chris Jr. gave me an A+ report. With a toothy smile he showed me the set of Pokemon cards his dad had bought for him and recalled watching a sword come out of a 3D printer. “What about the meat stuff that you tried?” his dad — Chris — asked from his venison stall perch. A solid nod of approval from Jr.
“I had to explain this to my wife,” Chris said of the “fun” in guns. “She always says she doesn’t wanna go walk around us and watch us buy guns. There’s so much more than guns! There’s jewelry and food. I bought a dog leash here one year.”
Plus, there was the chance of educating his son about gun safety. “I think the less curious kids are about things, the less likely they are to mess with something dangerous,” Chris reasoned. While Chris and his brother enjoyed walking around “spending a ton of money” on new hunting rifles, Chris Jr. remembered the NRA jingle he’d watched online and didn’t touch anything — other than trading cards.
Jr. said he is, however, fascinated by guns: “I’m just interested in how powerful they are. It’s cool that they’re all different — none of them are the same,” the seven-year-old reflected.
Other youth were less engaged. A couple from Jersey, Ariana and Jim, brought their kids along to “browse.”
“He’s bored as shit,” Jim said of his son, who hid behind his father’s leg as I approached. Their daughter was glued to a phone screen while Ariana pushed her stroller over to a pickle stand.
Another family man, John Cuevas, brought his sons Matthias and Josiah along for the ride. It’s community building, he said: “Everybody is good people. It’s a good atmosphere.” Usually, the trio come with Cuevas’ brothers — he’s got six of them.
Cuevas said he considers the gun show a way of showing his kids “the good side” of guns — they can be “scary,” but when the right person gets their hands on them, “it’s something cool.”
What about all the Nazi merchandise and abounding skinheads, though? I asked him.
“To each their own.” He said it was a learning opportunity for his kids, and that parents should keep their points of view neutral while letting their children absorb the realities of our society.
The issue of hate crimes didn’t come up with his kids on Saturday, though. Instead, street crime was a primary discussion: “Philly is not a trustworthy place. Someone’s gonna take your car at a gas station. Guns are mandatory,” Cuevas stated. He said he’s collected about 15 guns illegally from shows over the years. “My dad had a huge collection,” Cuevas said, “it’s something I wanna pass down.”
Only one person openly said he “abhors” the Nazi regalia — a Civil War re-enactor named Tom who I caught giving my roommate a tutorial in holding a musket. For Tom and his friend J.P., guns are a pathway to studying history; tradition; theatrics.
Tom doesn’t have kids. But he was sympathetic to J.P., who has two.
J.P. said when he brings his son to gun shows, he keeps him close. He half-cocked his gun and said, “Hear that sound? It annoys the hell out of me.” The threat of a stray bullet is on his mind, but more important is allowing his kid exposure to the culture, letting him “ask questions the whole time,” including: “Dad, can I touch it?”
“Me and my wife are the authorities,” J.P. said. “Not that I don’t trust people — but I don’t. Do you trust your teacher in 2024?”
His son has been using a BB gun since he was 4; and J.P. uses the BB gun as a Pavlovian parenting tactic. The kid knows when a shooting contest is coming up, and he knows that if he does poorly in school he’s not going. “Rewards are just tools to manipulate your child,” J.P. said.
“Just like you train a dog,” Tom added with a slight smile.
J.P., a former history teacher, might keep his kids on a tight leash — but is a free thinker when it comes to swastikas. He gave my roommate a pop quiz when she brought up the surprisingly vast amount of Hitler merch on display:
“When you see a Nazi flag, what three words do you think of?” he prompted.
“Uh, fascism, antisemitism, genocide,” she said.
“What about the Confederate flag?”
“Hm. Slavery, racism…”
“Good, good,” he said. “Now, what about an American flag?”
“Oh! I've got this one. Imperialism, violence, and also genocide!” my roommate replied.
“Yeah, see? Some people might say patriotism, the American dream, Manifest Destiny,” he said. “It’s all contextual — history. It’s all subjective.”
The only hard truth in human history, he concluded, is that nothing is “automatic” besides “death and taxes.” It takes more than we think for a gun to go off, he said. But the lesson kids have to learn, he said, is “Guns aren’t toys! I tell my kids, don’t even point a nerf gun at someone unless they’re playing with you.”
We were getting lost in J.P. 's rationale when a senior selling transferable machine guns took a stab at meeting us at our level… as women:
“If a lady were to buy one, I think she’d find the lawn gets cut every week and the dishes get done,” he drawled. I gulped. I hoped my roommate wasn’t getting any ideas — it might really take an AR15 pointed at my temple before I got around to scrubbing our bathroom floor.
“Let me show you the battery powered woman pleaser,” he said, whipping out his iPhone and showing us a video of his wife pummeling bullets out of a short burst weapon that looked like a vintage cannon.
“So,” I stuttered, lodging my last fatal question forward: “She does that… for fun?”
“Oooooh, yeaaaaaah,” he confirmed.
I had been hoping I might adopt a newly subversive hobby during my visit to the gun show. Instead, I faced a fresh existential crisis: What is this thing we humans call "fun"?
As my roommate and I made for the car and buckled our seat belts, I shifted subjects.
“Hey, I’ve been thinking,” I nervously broached as if I were a child-hoarding husband, “Do you think we're ready to have another cat?”
