Those gun stores of yore were the man caves of the day. Add machine shops, factories, garages/service stations, rebuilder shops, whatever.
What gun stores have done is become 'retail' to attract more customers. The guys who would go to them then didn't care you swept the floor once a week. The people who frequent the well lit clean gun store of today expect the floor buffed and shiny. We've accepted that we need to "feminize" the experience so that the "family" is welcome. That's just merchandising at the retail these days.
Plenty of man cave stores still out there, it's those predisposed to avoiding them who miss out.
Take a read of the gun rental posts by Henderson Defense on arfcom. What do they do better than the other full auto rental ranges? No "gun babes" in daisy dukes. They operate the ranges with actual prior service members experienced in firearms operations and safety. They even choose lubricants which don't spit out the ports and charging handles to mark up the clients nice clothing.
They don't need to make it a rite of passage or employ "click bait" to make a sale. And the newer gun stores cater to that, where the old school man caves with girly calendars peeking out of back offices or rough language at the counter obviously are not.
Now, take that same mindset to the forums. Do you want to wade thru posts filled with pics of firearms toted by well endowed daisy duke wearing shooters? Or even female models? (Gotcha.) Or is the subject about the guns themselves and their employment in a legal manner?
Some censorship in a private forum is very necessary, just because some posters don't self discipline themselves and bring in all sorts of flammable rhetoric. Not every opinion is sound or even with any substantial foundation - opinions are like that.
Nope, all too often what has to be tamped down are emotional posts that don't reflect anything but the posters anguish his point of view isn't being wholeheartedly accepted. Kinda like the boyfriend/girlfriend disputes on Facebook aired for all and sundry to view. We don't really need our bandwidth taken up by a posters struggles to mature into a thinking adult.
Hence our demographics. And yes arfcom can be a bit more aggressive, but if you bothered to participate regularly it might just get the salt of wisdom applied to help some mature. They are looking for answers, too. Applying common sense to find an answer goes a long way there.
Should here, too, but we seem to still have those at their advanced level of maturity who still can't see the trees for the forest.
I finally got an android, but I don't plan on using it for forums. Can't at work, don't like keying a tiny screen, and more importantly, twice a day checking for a forum that only changes postings for the most part on a weekly basis is already too often.
Perhaps if posters were required to construct submittals of at least one hundred words with a maximum of two posts per thread . . . nah, sounds too reasoned. Nobody does that.
WHOA! Where did you grow up?
