What he said. There were NO restrictions on anything outside of the venue where Trump was speaking WHILE Trump was speaking.
There were no searches of anyone entering the exhibit hall or the individual class rooms. KY is a very 2A friendly state and open carry is allowed without a CCW permit. They also recognize every other state permit.
Lots of people had back packs, tactical packs, handbags, whatever. No one was searched. There was a lot of open carry and a lot more concealed carry.
This is just like last year, or was it the year before, when someone ran an article about "no loaded guns at the NRA", and it turned out to be vendors couldn't display loaded guns.
The only restrictions were on the press. There were two types of press credentials. One type allowed free access, but the other required escorts to certain areas. Also, no foreign media was credentialed this year.
The KY Exposition and Fair Center is a gigantic venue. It took about seven hours over two days for me to cover the entire exhibit hall.
Zappa, you should know better than to believe anything from the NY Daily Snooze.
That article, and the one it refers to, is totally and intentionally misleading. The restriction only applied if you wanted to attend the Trump speech. Everywhere else on the 11+ acres of exhibits, you could walk around with anything you wanted. Concealed carry was explicitly allowed according to their propaganda. Hell, there were lots of booths where they were SELLING knives. Nobody even asked us about it when we checked in and there were no metal detectors. But the article makes it sound like the entire site was a "knife-free" zone. I wonder why...