Has anyone ever had the chance to go to this show? My last was in 2012. Youtube " Why there ain’t any terrorist in Kentucky" if you haven’t. Last show was in Oct. 2021.
Didnt they stop doing that show all together?
I dont know if they stipped the show but everythin g i have seen about it has been positive
Last one…the 50th l believe was Oct. 2021. Range is still there. The night shoot was massive, barrel melt downs on a few. 700 -800
vendors, massive ammo selection in bulk barrels,crates, ect. for sale. Military show, ground and airborne. If it was gun related it could be found/bought there. *l Googled "Why no terrorists live in Kentucky " but l could not find it…but watch those that do pop up via YouTube Knob Creek Machine gun shoot.
Confirmation, thank you!
Sadly l used to go to Bill Goodmans gun & knife show at the Nashville Fairgrounds in Tennessee. Last show there was in 2016 l think? Always enjoyed the show. " Bring a buddy tell a friend". I left there many, many times through the years, arms full or empty handed.
well that confirmation sucks… but so be it.
The real shoots were Monday through Sunday, with the show advertised for the public being Friday through Sunday.
I attended when Knob was an invitational shoot without a gun show. I lost interest when the night shoots turned into a public spectacle and the gun show became so big that the event was overpopulated. It stopped being fun during the Clinton administration when I had to swim through the crowd like a salmon to get from the tables to the firing line and found agents photographing the sideplates of my guns.
I used to shoot from the benches or from atop a 6x6 or a Power Wagon. In the 90s surplus 762N was imported for 3 cpr and sold at the show for 15. I could shoot 50,000 rounds over the week for $1500. By the end of the weekend the truck beds were knee deep in brass, which makes that minigun pic look like a small pile.
Truth be known the shoot was dangerous. There were a large number of accidents that played a role in the shutdown.
There were enough regularly occurring dynamite mishaps that car parts and the tops of the gas drums routinely got blown back to the firing line. When I saw a 2" hole ripped through a Craftsman tool box on the firing line I started to wear a flak vest and helmet, then I moved off of the crowded bench area on the firing line and moved to vehicles to get away from the yayhoos. I remember one fellow who refused to rivet the sideplate on his 1919 and used nuts and bolts with lockwashers instead. During the shoots he kept stopping to tighten up the nuts. Some of us had a pool on how long it would take for his gun to blow up.
The public used to be able to shoot Neal Smith’s minigun for $250 for a 250-round burst that lasted 2.5 seconds. In the early90s a father was filming his daughter shooting it and told her “Press the red button and no matter what happens don’t let go.” During the burst the minigun broke off of it’s mount, rotated upward, and put the remainder of the belt through the little girl’s head at 100 rounds/second. It was a grisly scene. The girl’s father documented it all on VHS tape.
The GPMG, HMG and auto cannon had enough power that the 300 yard rock formation didn’t provide an adequate backstop. At night people used to skip rounds off of the rocks to make belts of tracers ricochet vertically. There was a visit from the Bullitt County Sherriff to let us know that bullets that were landing in a trailer park a mile or so downrange. God only knows how far the Flak 30 and 20mm Vulcan rounds were going.
The Knob used to be fun when it was just a blaster’s hangout to camp and shoot for a week. I used to go twice every year. After the Fall 86 shoot it turned into a spectacle for wannabees and it’s gotten worse every year after that. Eventually even the shooters had no place to park and getting a place to stay became as tough as booking a hotel in Indy on 500 weekend. I stopped going altogether when spectators started recording iphone videos for social media.
The official reason that the shoots were closed down was because Kenny got old and the shoot had grown to be such a huge event that his kids didn’t want to handle the huge production twice a year. I could never believe that as it was a huge money maker for his entire family. I think the real reason it got shut down was because the social media exposure got them dropped by their insurance carrier.
I saw on the news “The Sawmill’s” Machine Gun Shoot was getting some flak here in the Upstate SC. It’s a very good training facility (may or may not have had some training there). From what you state that one got completely out of control. From what I’ve heard do something stupid @ The Sawmill, you’re out. Train Hard, Train Right.
Oh wow straight from a attendee! I knew a little of the stories. Always wondered myself about stray rounds beyond the birm/backstop. It was crowded when l last attended. Your detailed firsthand information is almost overwhelming but l can understand why more clearly. Thank you!
“straight from an attendee”
I think of it more as a participant (shooter) than an attendee (observer). It was a lot more fun when it was just a shoot, and i was a participant. It was never as much fun once the crowds took over and i became viewed as a demonstrator, or as a public entertainer. That’s when I quit going.
“Train hard, Train Right.”
No. Those military indoctrination slogans are intended to induce conformity while sacrificing freedom of thought and behavior. It amazes me that people fail to recognize that when those methods are applied to the public they have the net effect to erode the conceptualization of freedom.
Free men train for effect, not to satisfy someone else’s arbitrary perception of what is “right” under a standard that is intended to control the behavior of the trainee to produce results that are desired and deemed acceptable by their superior. Accepting something as “right” requires the trainee to impose obligatory controls on both behavior and thought processes. The intended result is the conversion of free-thinking men to task-performing conformists who become order-following subordinates (grunts). While that’s necessary in a military context, it is exactly the opposite of what we need in the free population – obedience to standards is the foundation for the erosion of freedom in the general population.
Over the years I’ve seen a distressing amount of “military ethic” programmed into the minds of the non-military gun public who eagerly embrace it, have no understanding of it’s adverse effects and have no reservations about accepting it. It is as if the gun public has embraced being brainwashed to believe that you have to accept rigid military thinking to be a firearms enthusiast.
Unfortunately there are enough military, police, and LARP in the gun community that this kind of mindset ends up being embraced, at the cost of constraining the population’s perception of what weapons are and what constitutes their “proper use.” There is no such thing as “proper use” or “training right”. Those are subjective standards imposed by people in positions of power and control, who intend to shape peoples’ behavior to make them easier to control.
“Train right” applies to the military and the police, who have become progressively militarized in their training. The concept is embraced by LARP wannabees, not free men. It definitely does not reflect the mindset of old-school blasters, who aren’t people who shoot to engage in soldier fantasies. I have to agree though, if you want to attend a firearms demonstration that’s safe to soccer mom standards, KCR was not the place to go.
“that one got completely out of control”
That’s brainwashed talk. Knob was never intended to be “in control.” At Knob the SOT and Tier1 NFA collectors (pre-Hughes era) paid the tax to play with their toys - there were no crowds to entertain and no compulsory standards to live by. Nobody ever gave a shit about about “training” or satisfying someone’s subjective standards of “safety” – those ideas imply that our use of machineguns has to be limited by what someone else deems “proper.” (Screw that.) Tier 1 was comprised of a group of responsible people who set their own standards for responsibility. In the days of free men, shooting at KCR involved acknowledging and accepting the risk that went with standing on a firing line with 150 other people firing belt fed weapons at cars and fuel drums at close range that were rigged with dynamite. It was dangerous. People got hurt. The firing line was no place for pussies. The risks were understood and accepted. When the range went live everyone’s only interest was to be the guy to hit the dynamite and blow shit up – nobody was concerned about making an inherently unsafe alpha male activity safe by soccer mom standards.
KCR participants were not enlisted men who trained in a box to satisfy a superior’s standards of what is “right” or “safe” use of their weapon. In the old days blasters were more like the men of the Wild West – non-conforming free men who were expressing their freedom in defiance of those people who wanted to regulate or control them. We did things that offended soccer moms because we intended to exercise freedom in a way that was indifferent to soccer moms. There was no political correctness. Nobody ever worried that being on the firing line was safe, and everyone signed waivers acknowledging the risks.
Today it’s different – we’ve got people professing that safety is more important than freedom. Nothing is the way that it used to be. It saddens me to see how much our perception of freedom has been eroded.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. – Benjamin Franklin
this is a brilliant statement.
and that there, is half our problem on a national scale.
as your quote of franklin said.
as an aside, i really enjoyed reading your thoughts on KRC, and freedom.
Man, that makes for one hell of a story years later. I always wondered what the shoots were like.
Very eloquent response. Train hard, Train right was something I made up, if I stole someone’s or some entity’s slogan I apologize. What it means to me is exactly that and no one else. Can I reliably run my equipment under less than ideal circumstances? Maybe. Training in an environmentally controlled range @ 25 yd. while good, under live fire circumstances where you do have to sign a waiver even better. Kinda like eating a rotisserie chicken, ya eat the meat and leave the bones and whatnot on the plate. I’d be hard pressed to find a Franklin quote I’d take issue with.
It’s good to know that not every mod has me on his naughty list. 
I didn’t mean any offense to Rufus, but I couldn’t resist speaking out to make an example of his comment. I wasn’t sure how well my response would go over, as it is founded upon our ability to recognize the insidious nature of an accepted convention as it evolves to erode freedom. I’m glad to hear that my point was appreciated by some.
I tried to frame my comment in the context of “training,” but if I were to rewrite it today, to start off the paragraph saying “Free men don’t train – they just have fun with their guns and learn along the way.” My meaning on this is that “training” is a military/police concept that is being sold to LARPers , 3-gun shooters who agree to be confined by some arbitrary set of “rules”, and the idea of “conforming use” that ultimately becomes adopted by the general population. That needs to stop.
Free men go out and have fun with their guns and training/familiarity occurs as a by-product of exercising freedom. Admittedly, some of the ways that we had fun with our guns in the old days would raise eyebrows even among modern day shooters – I hate to say it, but to some extent everyone has become indoctrinated in our society to have a more narrow view of “acceptable use” and freedom from one generation to the next. Even the 2A crowd has been subjected to successive generations growing up in more prohibitive environments, which only serves to narrow peoples’ concept of “acceptable use.”
Some of this restriction in what people think of as acceptable use has come as a byproduct of administratively limiting inexpensive surplus ammo importation, with the intent to block access to low-cost ammo, thereby raising prices to the point that the cost of exercising freedom becomes an economic barrier to most people. This is done on purpose – to cause the old ways of exercising freedom become foreign and forgotten. We’ve more than crossed that threshold because few people today can afford to shoot a few thousand rounds on the weekend.
During one of our fireside chats at Knob I listened to Kent Lomont’s elderly dad tell stories about the days of his youth with his friend Elmer Keith. In comparison, all of my escapades were downright boring. Basically, they had learned “the great lesson” that there are two classes of objects in life — “things you can shoot and things that you can’t.” They viewed the entire world from this perspective. They shot everything they could get away with shooting. My generation seems to have lost that line of thought. The youngest generations can’t even fathom it. Their method of target assessment is alien to us today because their decision making of what was a target vs. what was a non-target was framed in the perspective that they carried guns on them at all times, everywhere they went, always at the ready. Few of us have that sort of liberty today (liberty that allows us to openly carry a rifle or a pistol with us at all times, everywhere we go, ready to shoot at any target that might pop up). The idea of having a gun on you at all times, looking at something, and deciding whether what you see is a target or not is something that we can’t fathom because we’re not always carrying a run, ready to shoot, and looking at everything through the lens of whether we can shoot it or not.
Back to stories… here’s a Knob story that I hope will change everyone’s thinking on what constitutes “acceptable use.” It’s about the kind of fun that you can only have when there is an endless supply of cheap ammo.
Somewhere about the early/mid 1990s Jim Beam came out with a collection of “micro distillery” bourbons. One of them was named “Knob Creek” and the label was printed on a simulated recycled newspaper to look like it was made by a moonshiner. The brand was just released and hard to find. When I found it I bought 2 cases and took them to the shoot as a novelty item. Nobody else had ever seen or heard of it, so the bottles were in demand.
After a day’s shooting we were drinking a bottle at the fireside outside of Kent’s army tent. When there was a lull in the conversation, Kent, being the rogue that he was, threw a couple of boxes of .22LR into the fire to get everyone’s attention… (If you’ve never done it, liberty demands that you do.)
I traded a quart of bourbon to John Ross for some .45 ACP ammo and he gave me an autographed copy of his book. The next day he proudly displayed the bottle on his table where he was doing a book signing. Everyone that saw the bottle wanted one. He told people that I was interested in trades and how to find me.
Paul Reed (Navy Arms) found me and offered me an original 1945 Nazi (Austrian) 300 rd Tragschlaufe of 8mm Mauser. I agreed, but only if he would sell me one of the unfired Nazi production/Waffen-stamped P-38 that he was importing from Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. (After the Soviet collapse all sorts of captured WWII Nazi gear was uncovered in the ex-Comm block states and everything – including millions upon millions of rounds of Soviet ammo – was being liquidated for almost nothing.) Paul left his bottle on the dashboard of his van during the shoot and it got hot enough in the sun to pop it’s cork, leaking booze all over and down into his dash. He had to drive back to the East coast in a van that stunk to high heaven of bourbon.
I traded Dolf Goldsmith for a copy of The Devil’s Paintbrush. What a wonderful book. It has a great picture in it where Sir Hiram Maxim used an 08 Maxim to cut down a tree while demonstrating his gun for Chinese customers.
I mentioned that picture of Maxim to Kent, who decided we should shoot down a tree the next morning. He used his Mag 58 to fell a large oak trunk from the left side of the range. He then sectioned off a log and used an endless supply of belts to roll it downrange. He was shooting from a 6x6 on the far left edge of the firing line, and was rolling the log across the range to the right…
I recognized what he was doing and decided to give him a fight. I used my 1919 from the middle of the line to push the log back. It was like game of tug of war. We were just a little distraction that was going on while everyone else was focused on blowing up cars and 55-gallon gas drums. Our little contest was taking a LONG time. Rolling a log with bullets isn’t very efficient! While we were doing this the other shooters had blown up everything else on the range so the RO called a cease-fire. The shot-up log was sitting in the middle of the carnage. It was a draw.
During the break Kent bet me a can of .50 tracer against a bottle of Knob Creek that he would win the next leg of the contest, both of us agreeing to use 762N tracers to steal the show. Kent, atop his 6x6, had a ridiculous amount of linked ammo for the Mag, and I had a few thousand tracers (a dozen or so cloth belts) for the Browning. I ran out long before he did, and my crew couldn’t crank the belting machine fast enough to keep up. When I ran dry Del from Paragon saw what had happened and brought me cans of 762 on Browning links to keep the fun going. The Browning barrel was already bright orange and my assistant gunner was dumping water on the gun to cool it off. Eventually we ran out of water and some of the “grain alcohol and rainwater” club who were on the adjacent lane started pissing on the barrel and everyone took turns while I kept shooting. At least once during the reloading process I remember shouting:
At that point my barrel was spent, I had run out of ammo, and I let anyone who had belted ammo take over the gun. Technically I was now cheating on the bet, but nobody cared, it was all in good fun.
When it was over the billet log had been reduced to a twig on the far right side of the range. Kent had won. We had both wasted barrels and thousands of rounds of tracer to win a bet over a $20 bottle of bourbon. It made no sense whatsoever, but we were having great fun and didn’t care. He gave me the can of ammo and I gave him the bottle of bourbon, and I gave a bottle of bourbon to everyone who had brought me a belt. Everyone had a great time. It was just one of many fun days at the Knob Creek Shoots. * (see disclaimer below)
I could go on telling stories like this forever, every day of the shoot would be a different story. Some of the best stories I’ll only tell around a campfire. The moral of the story is that you should not allow society’s conventions and what other people consider “acceptable use” to limit what kind of fun you have with your guns.
Tell you what … if you can ever get me around a campfire I’ll you stories of the SOF conventions… pistol contests using wet phonebook backstops in the hallways of the Sands, rappelling off of the Sands tower at night, having the shit kicked out of me with a giant Q-Tip (pugil stick) by a drunken SEAL as we sparred on a catwalk spanning the swimming pool at the Sands bungalows, and blowing up cars that had 3 letters painted on them at the firepower demo in the desert… with a throbbing hangover.
Times have changed. Today nobody has as much freedom as we had back then. Back then it was all good clean fun. Today Karen would call the cops, who would panic and bring out the SWAT teams to kill everyone who is seen carrying a gun as they restore order.
Now that I’ve got everyone’s attention, I recommend that you pick up a book that I am reading:
Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State”
This is a scholarly book that documents the proliferation of gun control laws in the interest of “public safety” in the Post-WWI (German) Weimar Republic – at a time when economic times were hard and polarized political factions were protesting and fighting it out in the streets. Sound familiar? It documents the passage of gun control laws, the disarmament of the population, how the registrations were centralized “to protect them from abuse,” how the centralized records facilitated abuse by political groups that came to power, and how the registrations ultimately came to be used as the means of eliminating all “enemies of the State.” While reading the first few chapters I compared the progress of current legislation in the US to the creation of the analogous laws in the Weimar Republic, and found that once the same types of laws were established in Weimar Germany it only took 5 years until you-know-who seized emergency powers and turned the world upside down.
- Just in case any of our friends from the agencies are reading: This is a work of fiction and I swear that none of the aforementioned events ever actually happened. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
All works of Truth have an element of Fiction. Sometimes all of it… 
Very eloquent response. Train hard, Train right was something I made up, if I stole someone’s or some entity’s slogan I apologize. What it means to me is exactly that and no one else. Can I reliably run my equipment under less than ideal circumstances? Maybe.
Your post reminded me of years ago a friend in the woods of western PA used to have what he called “The Cookout” He had a gas well on his farm that he hooked up a giant homemade cinder block grill. We’d do a couple whole hogs and a **** ton of chicken and throw down. We’d open the bleed valve on the top of that well and light it off. I Imagine the blue flame from that bad boy went well over a thousand feet in the air if not more. The Marion Center VFD never bothered with the 911 calls as there was usually a couple of their members there with their radios.
Fear and a sheeple mentality is baked into to this new world in which we live. We/he shut it down when the word got out, too many interlopers showed up and one tried to sue him for his own act of stupidity. I get the whole Free People exercising their God given right to be free.