I'm interested in planning some weekend trips just to get out of the house and do something new.

Are there any cool gun related museums/stores/dealers/or anything else that would be neat to visit?

Within a few hundred miles of the Cincinnati area would be nice....

Sounds like my kind of place!

bwilder10h -

this is way way way out of your area - but if you ever get over to jolly old england, there is the royal armoury in leeds.  they too have an example of every weapon every used since pre-roman times.  they have jousting shows and workshops where they actually remake - authentically swords, armour etc.  great place but a bit overwhelming i must admitt.

steve

I would like to see England someday. If and when I do, I'll keep this in mind...

Aberdeen proving grounds is incredible!  The History channel often uses their humpty dumpty curator for some of their programs.

GO THERE, YOU WILL NOT BE SORRY!

If your e coming from Ohio, the drive isnt too long (maybe 5 - 6 hours, depending.)

NRA Museum is not close to you but definately worth visiting if you are in the Washington DC area. They also have a state of the art indoor shooting range and yes you can shoot your AR15 there.  (But MAN is that loud indoors).

One of the best, if not the best firearms museum is up in Cody Wyoming home of the Bufflo Bill Historical center http://www.bbhc.org/ There firearms museums web page is http://www.bbhc.org/firearms/index.html

We try to make it back every couple of years. I can spend a entire day in the firearms museum without any problems.

The J.M. Davis Gun Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma has a large collection.

In fact, Davis collected so many guns that the building can only hold about 1/3 of them at any given time.  It's a large building, too.

(My comments are based on my visit several years ago.  They may have changed since then.)

However, probably 90% of the guns are ordinary pieces with no particular historical or artistic or mechanical significance.  The collection isn't labeled particularly well;  usually there's just a numbered tag hanging off each gun's trigger guard.  They all hang in rows and rows of "bookcases" with glass fronts.  The museum staff supposedly rotates the stock from time to time so that most or all of the guns get displayed, although I'm not sure why they would really need to bother;  if they'd just cull the collection by discarding duplicates and near-duplicates, they could free up most of the space.

Still, in a collection so large, there are bound to be many guns that would match just about anyone's interest.  For that reason alone, it's a must-see at some point in every gun nut's life.

A few displays are set up so that the guns have some context, but only a very few.  Mostly it seems like a giant gun warehouse.  The museum has even shown up on TV news shows in which the talking heads are discussing gun control, with the implication that it is a police evidence locker for the storage of criminally-used firearms.

Next time you're near eastern Oklahoma, drop in for a visit.  You won't believe your eyes.

[url]http://www.oklaosf.state.ok.us/~jmdavis/[/url]
[url]http://www.oklaosf.state.ok.us/~jmdavis/inside.html[/url]
[url]http://www.oklaosf.state.ok.us/~jmdavis/davis.html[/url]

P.S. Apparently there's also a Will Rogers Museum in the same town!  It might be new, since I didn't hear about it when I drove through a few years ago.

In Colonial Williamsburg theres a museum there with a nice collection of period firearms, and in the governor's mansion there is a large number of rifles on the cielings and walls :D