>>683420
>expensive
nonsense, there's tons of good deals at gunshows and most of them are far cheaper than cabela's. The issue is you get the gun snobs in there who'll throw up their winchester that's been used to shovel shit for the last 50 years, put a picture of a cowboy next to it, then sell it for 3 grand. ARs have always been expensive so it's no surprise they still cost a fair amount at shows but conversely they cost a lot less than in stores. A 1200 dollar AR at a shop is usually around 800 at a show. As a collector of bolt actions and old shit shooters I usually never pay more than 150 bucks. I bought my carry pistol, a charter arms bulldog in .44spl, for 250 bucks and that was only two years ago. The trick to haggling isn't to lowball them, the trick is just to knock a few bucks here and there off. In WA for example, you gotta pay 25 bucks to get the gun transferred so you can try and knock that off. If you know you need to fix something with the gun and it's not significant like replacing the sights, knock off 30 bucks. The best time to go to a gunshow is on the last day of the show, sure all the show stoppers are gone but now you got a ton of deals and desperate sellers looking to off load. 3 years back I had a guy sell me 6 arisakas for 300 bucks because the show was ending in an hour and he didn't want to carry them to the car. Granted two of them were bubba'd but the rest were perfectly fine with some expected stock gouges. That might be an edge case scenario but it's not uncommon to buy a gun at a show for ~100 dollars, just don't expect to buy an AK or an AR.
The issue here is anon went to a show without any common sense in tow, got suckered into buying some garbage rod for a huge markup and now assumes everyone there are snakes. Most of the folks there are genuinely nice people, the fudds keep to their corner and the snobs go without sales because no one is that retarded.