Two years ago they had the Best in Show gun at the SHOT Show...check out what Helena, Montana's Olympus Arms is offering up now.

If you served as an Army Infantryman you might remember the 203. The 203 is basically a single shot grenade launcher that was attached to a rifle.

Imagine a 203 on steroids that can not only hit area targets, but it can hit point targets like shooting the grenade through a window, or even taking down drones. That is what Mike Merino, the founder & CEO of Olympus Arms in Helena was showing off at the SHOT Show in Las Vegas this year (featured in the top right corner of the photo above).

Merino is also the President of Mars, Inc- a firearms research and development company based in Montana. He teamed up with Barrett to develop a next-generation 30mm support rifle.

Mike Merino: "What the army wants is a grenade launcher that can compete with China's and Russia's grenade launchers. Right now, they have much more deadly grenade launchers than we do. We have the M203, or the M320, and they can over match us, and it's very, very dangerous, right? So we don't want our adversaries to have the better weapons. That's kind of the whole point. I'm in this business now.

Mars and Barrett are now a finalist in the PGS X tech competition. So, if you went to their SHOT Show booth in Vegas, what would you have seen? Here's a little of our Q&A. 

Mike Merino: What you're going to see is a 30 millimeter semi automatic magazine fed recoilless grenade rifle.

Aaron Flint: Awesome.

Mike Merino: It is. It is.

Aaron Flint: Like a hand carried MK-19

Mike Merino: Yes, exactly. I tell people it's a handheld howitzer. And it is the most lethal shoulder fired weapon ever designed. It is so powerful. So what it does is it shoots 30 millimeter air bursting grenades, and it has a range of zero to 600 meters. It's counter drone. It's counter defilade. You could shoot one of these rounds in through a window of a room full of bad guys and end the conversation, take out a machine gun bunker with a single shot...

Aaron Flint: So it's not just an area target. It can be that precise.

Mike Merino: It is point precision. You could shoot this towards a drone. It won't go off until it gets close enough to a drone to go off. So it is so, so powerful.

Here's a video:

 

Plus, earlier in the week Attorney General Austin Knudsen (R-MT) was telling us about the new modular pistol from Shield Arms in Bigfork, Montana. You can see a photo of that in the top left corner of the above photo.

Also featured in the photo above is my friend Travis Taylor who is the founder and CEO of Glacier Payments in Whitefish, Montana. We used to do AAU wrestling in Glasgow, Montana back in the kids- so it was great catching up with him at the SHOT Show as well.

Full audio of that and more can be heard in the following podcasts, along with the rest of our day 3 SHOT Show coverage.

SHOT Show- Montana to Las Vegas

We took the trip from Montana to Las Vegas for the SHOT Show- the world's biggest guns and outdoor gear show. From radio row to the trade show floor.

Gallery Credit: Aaron Flint