Gun Shows In Italy: Yes, They're Awesome!

When the average American firearms enthusiast thinks of gun shows in Europe, the first things that will come to his or her mind are trade shows like IWA in Germany, or for the more strictly defense-related events, DSEI in the UK and EUROSATORY and MILIPOL in France; events that are strictly “trade-only,” accessible by a selected number of business operators, government officials,  and members of the press, much like the NSSF SHOT Show. And yet, trade shows dedicated to the civilian firearms market and open to the general public do take place in Europe. There’s the Waffen-Sammlerbörse in Lucerne (Switzerland), the British Shooting Show in Birmingham (UK). And then, there’s Italy.

A Long Story

The first major trade show of the European civilian firearms industry was the Internationale Waffen Ausstellung, or IWA for short: debuting at the Nuremberg fairgrounds, in Germany, in 1974 with barely 100 exhibitors, it didn’t take long to evolve into the major event known today as IWA & OutdoorClassics. It was a “unicum,” a true world’s first, and it didn’t take long for the other major European player in the field of sporting guns, Italy, to realize that they needed their own international trade show. After all, it was customary for the gun industry of the “Italian Gun Valley” — the Val Trompia, located north of the city of Brescia and east of Milan, where over 80% of all the firearms industry of Italy is headquartered, to showcase their products at more or less improvised and sporadic fairs and events ever since 1857, a model not very different from that of the stereotypical image of the traveling exhibitors of Colt revolvers and Winchester rifles back in the days of the Old West.

Those who have read our previous article about gun laws in Italy (Firearms News, February 2023, Issue 3 — also available at FirearmsNews.com) will remember that Italian society was, back in the day, caught in somewhat of a conundrum in terms of how to approach gun ownership. On one hand, hunting was much more popular than it is now and even gun ownership at large was more socially accepted (not that it is significantly less accepted today, mind!), and even concealed carry licenses were released more liberally; on the other hand, Italy was embroiled in a spiral of politically-motivated violence, the “Anni di piombo” (“Years of lead”) that saw the country bear the brunt of the long, bloody season of political violence that hit western Europe as a whole from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s. It’s thus no wonder that the first attempts to organize gun shows in Milan — where a yearly expo of militaria, military memorabilia and airsoft, called “Militalia,” has been held twice a year, in May and October, since 1986 — didn’t come to full fruition, with a sketchy success at best. The Italian gun industry would have to wait until 1980 to have its own trade show.

Held in the city of Brescia, the capital of the province where the Val Trompia is located, EXA (“Expo Armi”) would be heavily sponsored by ANPAM, the Italian firearm industry trade association. Part of the Confindustria, the Italian national industrial employers’ federation, back in the day ANPAM was a true political and economic powerhouse; in the minds of the organizers, EXA would have to become a new North Star of the global sporting firearms market, attracting exhibitors from all around the world and rivaling both IWA and the recently instituted SHOT Show, whose first edition had been held in St. Louis, Missouri, just one year prior. Slowly but surely, however, as the years went by and editions followed one another, reality crept in. EXA was traditionally scheduled to take place in early Spring, generally by mid-March to early April, meaning it followed both SHOT Show and IWA, thus coming too late to host any global launch of interesting new products, except from smaller local manufacturers that couldn’t make it to foreign trade shows for whatever reasons.

The inability to attain a true international status led big foreign players to shy away from EXA, turning it into a showcase for the Italian gun industry and local distributors dedicated to the national market only. Which led to another problem: as you will remember from our article about gun laws, every firearm must be proof tested by the National Proof House and legally cleared before it can be imported and distributed in Italy. Guaranteed, today procedures are way faster and more streamlined than they were up until the year 2011, when a government commission could sit on a request for months at a time. This meant that EXA always came too late for manufacturers to launch their new products to the global markets, and too early for national distributors to introduce that year’s new products to the Italian national market. EXA was perpetually stuck in a circle, confined to the role of local showcase for last year’s stuff, a perennial runner-up on such a demanding market. Additionally, since its first inception and up until the 2000s, EXA was a “trade only” show just like IWA and SHOT Show: it wasn’t open to the general public, and only exhibitors, representatives of the industry and government authorities, firearm distributors and dealers, and members of the press were admitted. As the years went by, such a model became economically unsustainable, even for such a small venue as the Brescia exhibition center.

Failure to Rebirth – Time and Time Again

By the mid-2000s, the decision was made to open EXA to the general public; first for one day, then for two, then for the whole four days. As EXA was traditionally held on weekends, the opening to the public was met with overwhelming success, at the height of which (2010) the show counted 45,000 attendees. By comparison, that very same year, approximately 57,000 visitors had attended the much bigger and internationally relevant SHOT Show. As much as it would seem impressive for a show, whose truly important part could fit in a single pavillion of the Brescia exhibition center, one needs to remember that the “internationally relevant” part of the previous period is the important one. EXA never landed a role of international relevance, and the growth of the show attracted numerous additional exhibitors that went on to occupy the other pavillions of the exhibition center; from firearms, ammunition, accessories, airsoft, and specialized garment and gear, EXA went on to include hunting clubs, lodges, and gears; canine exhibitions; blades; but also, smaller stands that sold anything from knick-knacks to local produce. The event quickly became an overly bloated, distorted version of itself, more akin to a county fair. It was provincial, small-town minded to the bone, and having followed all editions since the early 2000s in person, the author witnessed that process in person.

Meanwhile, in 2006, a competitor had risen on the horizon: called the Hunting Show, taking place in the Vicenza exhibition center just a few kilometers to the east of Brescia, in the Region of Veneto, on the road to Venice. It was held in the span of three days, always open to the public. Hunting Show had managed to amass an impressive number of attendees, 20,000 in the 2009 edition. At the same time, EXA exhibitors kept lamenting of how the venue for the event was inadequate for their needs, of how exhibition space was overly expensive, and how little attention was given to the needs of exhibitors. Behind the curtains, the main driving forces behind EXA (the above-mentioned ANPAM, but also the Italian national firearms retailers’ association, Assoarmieri, and the consortium of firearms manufacturers of the Province of Brescia, a.k.a. CONARMI) had been secretly toying with the idea to merge the two expos into one. In March 2014, following several months of announced forfeits from EXA exhibitors, it was announced that the expo wouldn’t be held that year; it would become a permanent decision. EXA ended not with a bang but with a whimper, but only a few months later a successor was announced, in the form of the HIT Show (“Hunting, Individual protection, Target sports”), whose first edition would be held in the third weekend of February 2015. The plan to merge the two shows into one had been carried out. Only… less than brilliantly.

On the surface, HIT Show had a lot going for it. It was hosted in a better venue, the Vicenza exhibition center, which also hosts the yearly “Vicenzaoro” event — Europe’s biggest trade show for jewelry, gold, and similar valuables. The venue had better services, it was better equipped to deal with attendees and exhibitors and meet their needs, and even if the hodgepodge of mixed exhibitors and vendors (everything from hunting trips to hunting dogs trainers and exhibitions, from fishing equipment down to local venison cold cuts makers!) that had bloated EXA in its final years were siphoned into HIT Show, the Vicenza exhibition center had more, and bigger, pavillions to host them all and make the central part of the expo — the one dedicated to firearms, ammunition, and accessories –— less dispersive. For the first time in the history of gun shows in Italy, HIT Show also hosted scaled down IPSC stages, held by the Italian Practical Shooting Federation (FITDS), where the youngest and… less younger attendees could experiment with practical shooting using airsoft replicas; and even indoor, modular shooting ranges — provided by a major Italian manufacturer which is also a supplier for the Italian Armed Forces — that allowed visitors to actually test-fire some of the guns on display! In 2019, HIT Show went on to score a massive 40,000 attendees, compared to the 58,000 visitors of the SHOT Show the same year. 2019 would also be the final year of HIT Show. The political climate in Vicenza, being more left-leaning than in Brescia, brought pressure on the organizers with pacifist, anti-hunting and otherwise leftist activists pointed at the show as “an ideological operation to promote the diffusion of a dangerous gun culture in Italy.”

As you may remember from our article concerning gun laws in Italy, a radically negative attitude towards gun ownership is not a sentiment that a broad portion of Italian society shares, but gun grabbers don’t need the majority of the people to align with them, only a certain number of people that count. When the biggest bank in the city, which was also one of the main sponsors of the show, decided to cut ties with the organizers, HIT Show was doomed to shut down… or was it?  Because its successor was announced in 2020, and debuted in 2021, after the worst year of COVID: taking place in the city of Verona, just east of Vicenza, EOS (European Outdoor Show) is hosted in an environment politically less leaning to listen to the endless blabbing of gun grabbers and tree huggers; and while still plagued by the issues inherited from HIT Show and EXA — namely the dispersive nature of the exhibits, the lack of success in reaching a true international status, and the political bickering among organizers and exhibitors for prices, relevance, and general control over the event — EOS could go on to become the real successor to EXA.

The 2023 edition of EOS, held back in February, hosted 37,500 attendees that went on to visit the booths of over 350 exhibitors over five halls and more than 645,000 square feet of exhibiting space in the span of three days. Not bad for a small, provincial consumer show, huh? And that’s not all, because currently Italy has another big yearly event dedicated to firearms, ammunition, accessories, hunting, and outdoors: dubbed Caccia Village, it is held every year in the rural setting of Bastia Umbra — a small town in central Italy — and traditionally takes place in mid-May, allowing for wide outdoors exhibitions, demonstrations of products, and even hands-on tests of firearms, ammunition, and other products on display for the general public to enjoy. The eleventh edition of Caccia Village, held this year, welcomed over 34,000 attendees and 300 exhibitors. While they may be a far cry from what the largest trade shows of the firearms industry in the United States end up hosting, they’re indicative of the interest in guns and gun ownership in a Country whose population is one fifth of that of the US and whose gun ownership rate isn’t nearly comparable with America.

“Unregulated,” But Not Lawless

Our readers who took a look at our article about gun laws in Italy and have made themselves a picture of how convoluted and arguably more restrictive they are compared to the US, will be excused for thinking that laws also impose all sorts of restrictions concerning events open to the general public where firearms are on display. In reality, the only law that applies to gun shows specifically is a general ban on “itinerant commerce on firearms,” meaning that customers cannot purchase guns or ammunition at a show — but both end customers and firearm retailers can actually place orders. Anything else can be on sale, including blades, magazines, accessories, apparel, you name it. The authority to regulate gun shows in Italy is devolved to local authorities, in the form of the “Questura” — that being, the National Police headquarter for every given Province — and the “Prefettura” (the detached office of the Italian Ministry of Interior in each Province). Whenever a gun show has to be held, the organizers will meet with the relevant authorities and will be handed out a list of provisions that shall be followed during the event.

Some of those provisions are pretty standard and equal all throughout the national territory, that being, firearms on display shall not be live (they should have their firing pins or other key components removed) and shall be tied to a bench or another support so that they can’t be easily stolen. Some shows will also tag the guns — a picture that will be familiar to any American gun enthusiast who ever visited SHOT Show, NRAAM, or NASGW. Further measures may be imposed by the authorities on public safety grounds, depending on the conditions of the area where the show is planned, but while that was the case during some editions of EXA in Brescia — where some exhibitors, almost at random, were sometimes essentially mandated to keep their guns under glass! Nowadays, you would be hard-pressed to see guns on display at a show in Italy in a way that differs radically from how they are showcased during similar events in the US.

Additionally, exhibitors will have to contact the aforementioned Questura and provide them with a list of the firearms they intend to showcase, complete with the model’s name and serial number; they will receive an authorization for transport and storage at the show grounds, along with, once again, the provisions to follow during the event. On the surface, this decentralized regulation system may seem optimal. In reality, it couldn’t be farther removed from that. Technically speaking, the involved officials should take and motivate their decisions based on factual issues and concerns regarding the public safety situation in the area where the a given gun show is to be held; the reader will however easily recognize that the possibility of officials who are, to use a euphemism, strongly opinionated about firearm ownership by the everyday citizen letting their personal beliefs get the best of them always exists. And that, without taking the gun control crowd into account.

The War on Gun Shows in Italy

In Italy, the gun control advocacy movement is composed by a galaxy of small organizations with ties to the political left, trade unions, pacifist and environmentalist groups, and Catholic Church. And while most, if not all of them, do not openly state gun control as their main focus, often tending to identify themselves as “pacifists” at large, it is clear to anybody that lobbying for stricter gun laws is a pivotal point of their activities. As we wrote back in our article about gun laws in Italy, the number of citizens who believe that the country needs stricter gun control is by no means predominant, not even among leftist voters; indeed, in certain areas of central Italy where leftist parties are traditionally dominant, gun ownership is also widely spread, mostly for hunting or home defense. That is why gun control advocates in Italy work against gun shows by attacking from the sides. They will use their channels to depict gun shows as “unregulated supermarkets for guns,” despite the sale of firearms at shows being prohibited, and will paint them as “fairs of death” capitalizing on the anti-hunting sentiment of environmentalists and trying to persuade the public opinion that those trade shows are being used to market “weapons of war.”

As you may remember, if you read our article on Italian gun laws, the legal category of “weapons of war” in Italy includes only select-fire or full-automatic arms, rocket and grenade launchers, firearms disguised as other tools or items, as well as anything from cannons, to mortars, to heavy artillery, and toxic gas dischargers. While sometimes the Italian Armed Forces will display their issued weapons to the public during recruitment stunts, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see any of those firearms on display a gun show in Italy; it would make no sense, since as you may have understood by now, these shows are oriented to the civilian consumer market, and the presence of major defense expos elsewhere in Europe make it useless for the Italian defense industry to showcase their products locally. The anti-gunners will thus always, literally every time, use Josh Sugarmann’s old tactics of purposefully confusing the public opinion on the true nature of what is on display at trade shows, counting on the fact that an untrained eye will not likely be capable of distinguishing a modern sporting rifle from a select-fire assault rifle. At least for now, however, these tactics aren’t working, and the gun grabbers end up only preaching to their choir, even when they do manage to bring their “grievances” to the attention of the mainstream media at national level. That’s why the next page in their book is to exploit their contacts in local politics to pressure the relevant authorities and show organizers into giving in to requests for increasingly restrictive rules about what can be displayed at shows and who can actually attend.

The Next Generation

The presence of minors at gun shows in Italy, in particular, is something that the gun control crowd resents big time. Technically speaking, if a show is open to the public in Italy, access to minors cannot be restricted unless the object of the show is something that minors shouldn’t have access to. Essentially, we are talking about pornography and not much more. Disciplined, well-behaved children, escorted by their parents and wide-eyed with curiosity are thus a familiar and pleasant sight during gun shows in Italy. Seeing them handle firearms for the first time, supported and guided by their guardians as they learn how to embrace them properly and practice the basic rules of gun safety even with a bunch of inert husks with no firing pins, gives us hope for the future of the firearm owners’ community in Italy and in Europe as a whole. Needless to say, the gun grabbers are not happy with that. They scream “indoctrination” — something else they long to have a monopoly on as with every new edition of EOS or Caccia Village, they see their hopes of gun ownership in Italy declining due to sheer demographics shatter.

Every child who learns to properly handle and respect a firearm rather than be disgusted, repulsed, or scared by all guns is a defeat for their warped ideology. That’s why they have been lobbying with their local political connections to force gun shows to ban anybody under 18 from the premises, or at the very least, to forbid them from handling the guns on display. The Vicenza HIT Show gave in to their demands in 2018, modifying the rules of the show without input from public safety authorities to ban anybody under 18 from handling the guns on display. It didn’t take long as the author of this article witnessed himself, for one of the exhibitors to report to security that a minor was, indeed, violating that rule as his guardian,a middle-aged woman, took pictures. When handed over by the show security to law enforcement, that woman admitted that the kid in her company was the son of a friend, and that she had been asked by a prominent member of the city council, a left-wing party with strong ties to the previously mentioned gun control advocacy “galaxy,” to stage a violation of the rules and fabricate evidence so that the show could be shuttered for good. This is but an example of what the gun control crowd is willing to go; if the reader thinks it couldn’t get any worse than the dirty tricks the gun grabbers play in the US, he (or she) may want to think again. Then, there is the picketing. Anti-hunting, environmentalist and animal rights groups will picket gun shows either every day or at least on the opening day. It has become a tradition for them to exchange insults with the attendees from one side of the fence to the other, but despite their aggressive stance, picketers have always showed up in extremely small numbers and no major incident has ever been reported.

Go and Multiply

The efforts of the aforementioned gun control advocacy groups masked as pacifist and social justice collectives have so far been less than stellar in terms of success, in that in the past years gun shows open to the general public in Italy have been multiplying thanks to the individual initiatives of some major firearm distributors in the Country. As an example, Bignami — a company based in the Province of Bolzano, and single-handedly Italy’s biggest distributor of hunting, sporting, and defensive firearms on the commercial market — yearly hosts an event dubbed the “Bignami Day,” in which the public can visit the company headquarters and have “hands-on” experience with their products in a vast, dedicated showrooms. Other distributors like the Turin-based Paganini and manufacturers such as Sabatti (Sabatti.it/en) have also been organizing itinerant shows lately, mostly hosted by major shooting ranges, where the public can actually test the guns, those companies are offering on the market. Despite those “open days” being sporadic and not having a fixed schedule, they do manage to gather a significant number of attendees every time, eager to test their potential future purchase on target. While by no means as relevant and successful as their American counterparts such as SHOT Show, NRAAM, or NASGW, not to mention IWA Outdoor Classics, Italian gun shows enjoy a good level of success which, by itself, is a good indication of the interest of Italians towards gun ownership and shooting sports. If that wasn’t the case, the gun control crowd wouldn’t go to great lengths in their attempt to eradicate them, or at least to curb the potential those events have to educate the general public, and the younger generations in particular, towards a more positive and healthy approach to those topics.

And yet, if compared to their counterparts in other countries, the trade shows of the Italian firearms industry suffer from fundamental weaknesses: a “small town,” local, provincial attitude, the lack of a truly international approach, and excessive and often pointless bickering between and among organizers, exhibitors, and economic backers for reasons that are generally rooted in politics create “weak spots” that the gun control zealots, directed and instigated elsewhere, could use to cancel these educational events from our panorama, with all the relevant consequences — those being, depriving the gun rights and gun owners’ community of important gathering occasions and formative events for the future generations of shooters, whose sole existence thwarts the gun grabbers’ plans. Fortunately, despite the considerable financial and political support they receive from certain well-known segments both in Italy and abroad, they have so far been unable to achieve such goal. Like a hitherto nameless Ukrainian soldier said, “We are very lucky they’re so f*****g stupid.”

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