Braxton Taylor
The 2025 NRA Annual Meeting is winding down, and as with annual meetings of the past, there was a huge exhibition floor filled with booths from manufacturers big and small. Unlike SHOT Show, which is aimed towards the people who manufacture and sell firearms, the exhibits at the Annual Meeting are wide open to anyone who owns or is interested in guns. Here’s some of the new things of interest we saw of the show floor.
The 21st Century Belongs To Double-Stack 1911s
Once pretty much limited to practical-pistol competitions, the double-stack, single-action 9mm pistol is becoming an increasingly popular choice for concealed carry. Carrying a weighty, full-size gun with a thick grip can be a chore, though, which is why we’re seeing more and more compact and even micro-compact, larger-capacity single actions like the EAA Witness 2311 Brat, the Springfield Armory 1911 DS Prodigy 3.5″ Compact AOS, the Kimber CDS9c and the Smith & Wesson CSX-E show up on the floor of the Annual Meeting exhibition hall. These pistols (and others like them) give you that great 1911-style trigger and a larger magazine capacity than a standard 1911.
Handgun-Caliber Large Format Pistols
Not too many years ago, if you wanted a longer barreled gun in a pistol caliber, your choices were the original KelTec Sub2000, various lever-action rifles or a dedicated pistol-caliber AR-15 that would cost as much as an upper mid-tier AR in 233 .Rem.
Since then, thanks to the introduction of pistol brace and the pistol-caliber-carbine divisions in the practical shooting sports, large format pistols are all the rage. Add in the expiration of patents for the roller-delayed blowback action, and now we’re seeing high-quality variants of that iconic style of firearm produced by Military Armament Corp, ATI, Zenith and an interesting new gun from Springfield Armory.
The Gen 3 Ecosystem
Speaking of expiring patents, the ones for Gen 3 series of Glock pistols expired a few years ago, leading to companies like Zev Technologies, Shadow Systems and others to create pistols based on that system. Other companies like Stoeger jumped on board, and eventually Ruger joined in with the RXM. Other companies like SAR USA have used the Gen 3 internals as a jumping-off point to build accurate, reliable and rugged defensive pistols that meet or exceed standards for NATO acceptance.
What isn’t new is how much fun the Annual Meeting is to attend, and how great it is to hang out with thousands and thousands of your fellow gun owners and Second Amendment enthusiasts. I had a chance to relax and soak in the vibe at the NRA Country Stage, and then later in the week caught a seminar on the future of NRA training and how it’s keeping up with customer demand and rolling out new classes that are especially relevant to today’s gun owners.
No mater what your interest in guns is, you’ll find something that interests you at next year’s NRA Annual Meeting. You don’t want to miss it.
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