Handgun Magazines

I don't read them anymore, for the same reason I don't read martial arts magazines anymore. They're all about sensationalism and repetition. With MA mags, I got tired of all the "...Most Powerful Technique?" articles every month, and with gun mags it's always some variation of "...Best Concealed Carry Gun?" articles. The stories are all the same, with only the names changed. I look at the pictures, glance over the accuracy charts, and check the retail price. Then, I'm done.

I think Gun rags, like newspapers and (probably) porn, have fallen victim to the internet. Sadly, it seems many web-based gun sites are beholden to advertising revenue so their reviews are just as suspect. A few sites (http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com) do seem to value their independence and to offer unbiased reviews.

I would appreciate suggestions from forum members regarding any other relatively unbiased sites.

I bookstore read (with Latte in hand) Shotgun News and Combat Handguns. I rarely buy any of them. I read Shotgun news for the gun smith projects (and have learned a few things) and the history bits that are awesome some times. The Knox report is sometimes interesting.

I read Combat Handguns because it is written by Masad Ayoob and sometimes the reviews are interesting. Masad Ayoob is considered something of an expert in self-defense with handguns. He has appeared more then a few times as I understand it as an expert witness. As a lawyer I read it with a grain of salt but it has started some interesting research projects that have led to non-firearm successful criminal defenses where self-defense was used.

I also read one of the reloader ones on occassion, and Guns of the West I believe it is called. But I don't buy them admittedly. I just read them while I enjoy my soy mild latte with honey and cinnamon, as I'm dressed in a purple dress shirt from time to time and black dress pants with grey pin stripes with a stack of the latest comic books nearby (and people wonder why Bookstores are going out of business lol).

The facts I look for in gun magazines are typically not worth the price of buying a copy off the rack or a subscription. Normally I will flip through a magazine at the store and look at the ads for something new such as holsters and take pictures on my phone of the interesting ones to look up later. Rarely I will buy a magazine if it has a buyers guide with prices in the back or a worthwhile article. Most recently I bought a magazine that did ballistic tests on various .22Mag loadings. I have yet to get a gun magazine based on a review article about X firearm.

I stopped reading them before the plastic wonder gun craze began. I got sick of all the articles about boutique shop 1911s in the four figure price range every month, month after month. "Here's the latest overpriced 1911 you'll NEVER own!" The only gun mag I read now is Handloader.

I read gun magazines for free here:

http://www.fmgpublications.com/fmgdigitaleditions.html

Don't read them.

Years ago I read a few that gave some Israeli compact nine good reviews. I purchased it and it was a POS - every problem you can have - this firearm had. FTF,FTE, wouldn't go into battery, failure to ignite the rounds... it was junk.

Harris Tactical published a magazine called - Concealed Carry Handguns 2012 Buyer's Guide: "Pocket Pistols"

They had articles on the Kimber Solo, Beretta Nano, Kahr and even the Boberg. No mention at all of the Rohrbaugh R9.

Did Carl run over the editor's dog or something?

How can you have a magazine with that title and not have at least one article on the R9? OK, so no articles, but to completely omit it from the list of pocket handguns? Not even a mention of the R9 in the index / list?

I don't read their junk anymore.

I read every Handgun rag on the planet, only because the company advertizes in all of em' and we get them for free. They are all pretty much carbon copies of each other. Ever notice how they rarely give any tested gun a bad review? Even if it is junk. I suppose I like Handgunner the best because Mike and Clint and Mas and the rest of their staff have gained their knowledge from actual experience, not be reading what others before them have written and regurgitating it.

In the 80's I used to read every gun magazine published.

What I've come to realize about some of those writers though, is that they were basically story tellers. Most of them wrote well and they wrote engaging articles, but the articles had to be categorized as opinion or entertainment because so much that was put out either didn't have any basis in good science or was just factually incorrect.

If a writer creates an article on the Intratec CAT-9 and sings its praises - I'd have to say that was incorrect. The gun didn't function reliably for a vast majority of owners.

I think some of these writers began to believe their own BS and they crossed over into believing that they were experts on everything and anything to do with firearms. I think they either forgot or never knew that for the most part they were story tellers creating entertaining articles. Because if someone's opinions are driven by some kind of empirical study they can point to the conclusions of those studies to show how and why their opinions have changed. I found too many of these writers saying contradictory things. One month they'd write an article "The Trusted Six Shooter" and say "never mind all that talk about these high-capacity nines - the trusty six shooter will get the job done!" Then a month later they'd write a piece about a 9mm semi-auto and highly recommend it for Home Defense.

Well which is it pops?

I came to believe it was neither, it was infotainment.

I think those magazine writers are doing the best they can.

There is really nothing revolutionary developing in the gun industry in a monthly basis.

I mean how many new amazing sex secrets can writers of Cosmopolitan come up with on a monthly basis?

I never had any subscriptions to a handgun magazine, but I used to pick them up at the magazine counter whenever something particular stood out on the covers.

I quit buying them altogether not too many years ago when the straw broke the camel's back. I finally had it when I read yet another of those "it happened to me" kinda stories in one of the magazines. You know...somebody writes in a story about how a gun saved their life, or someone else's life, in some fashion?

Well, this one was about some guy working in a Stop 'n Rob convenience store when some bad guy tried to hold him up. So he draws his (fill in the blank comprehensive description of a handgun) and starts shooting at the bad guy...who abandons the robbery and runs away out the door...

...and the guy, who admits in his story to firing off a unknown number of rounds without hitting the bad guy at all, takes careful aim at the running bad guy who is now all the way across the parking lot and jumping a fence...and shoots him in the back, killing him.

So the story ends with the armed convenience store clerk, who couldn't hit anything up close with an unknown number of bullets while under pressure, but who could hit and kill a moving target with one well aimed shot in the back from at least 50-plus feet away...being praised and patted on the back by the police, who had been looking for this particular guy for a while.


That story was so full of farmland fertilizer that I couldn't believe it had been printed...and certainly not printed without some kind of accompanying commentary about the laws on self-defense and what it means to shoot someone in the back, especially when the threat had quite actively LEFT the scene of the crime.


I had always meant to write a letter to the editor about that one, but never got around to it. I wonder if I've still got that magazine in a pile somewhere?

The only gun magazines I look at these days are Shotgun News and Small Arms Review.

I read the American Rifleman because I get it as part of my NRA membership but to be perfectly honest my eyes glaze over when they start writing about the technical aspects of the guns.

I'm pretty much the same as you guys who posted. I used to buy them and actually got some good information out of them (using the principle of Caveat Emptor). As my tastes in firearms has changed and narrowed, I seldom buy one anymore because of the repetitive nature of the articles and the dearth of articles on subjects I care about.

Still, someone must be buying them since they have not yet gone out of business. I suspect their peak years are behind them, though. It's hard to stay in business when people read your product in the store or for free online.

I like to keep up with developments, but most of what is in the magazines is stuff I have seen before and going on 81 there is not a lot I haven't seen before. Plus, as the real experts pass from the scene, we get a lot of writers who appear to have learned from "the net". I see more and more errors that would never have been made in the old days when both writers and editors knew what they were talking about.

Jim

Gun Tests is my only subscription other than American Rifleman which is stricken with the above-stated issues. I love Gun Tests though. I have 18 full years....every issue in 3-ring binders.

I enjoy reading American Handgunner most of all. I do look at the others. I enjoy the diversity of writing in Handgunner, plus I do love looking at the high end photography in the ads.

Unless you are new to hand-gunning, you are not going to find much to benefit you in these magazines. There is always going to be "something else" to come along as the best thing since shirt pockets and make you consider your stuff trash (stuff that they touted as the best ever last year).

I get American Rifleman with my NRA membership but that's it as far as reading gun magazines go. And I really don't "read" it that much since AR, like every other gun mag, is on a honeymoon with every single gun in existence. Skimming an article about a gun that I know from experience is a POS and seeing the author wax exuberant over the thing is tedious at best.

There is really no reason to read one of today's gun magazines. The only halfway decent writer anymore is Mas Ayoob and he's been stretched too thin over the years. I miss writers who could actually write well like Skeeter Skelton, Jeff Cooper and even the crotchety old Charles Askins. Today's gun mags are full of unexciting, white bread writers whose main job is not offending any potential advertiser or overly sensitive reader. Then you get writers like the clueless Dick Metcalf who only distinguished himself by making an ass of himself in print. And, finally, how many times can these gun magazines print articles about the 1911 pistol? Answer: Infinitely. Repeatedly. Over and over. Again. Ad nauseam.

I don't like to read them because every new gun is bigger, better, badder, stronger, more powerful, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, and makes all previous guns worthless.

Same for rifles, deer now refuse to die unless shot with the super zoomy magno-nificent latest and greatest.

My ego can only take so much of that.........

Meh, I just look at the pictures.

Gun magazines are all hostages to the advertising dollar. I quit buying them years ago when I realized that I had not read a review on anything in them that wasn't glowing and positive. According to the gun rags there is no such thing as a poorly designed gun/scope/knife/ammunition or anything else they have handled.

They have lost all credibility!

I page through them at the newsstand occasionally and only buy if there is something inside that appeals to me. There's nothing wrong with reading them so long as one remembers that the articles were written about a product that was lent at no cost to the author/magazine and that some sort of relationship exists between the two.

Articles about guns are really nothing more than an extended ad, it helps to think of them as "infomercials" on paper....

Just like with anything else, there is good and bad. You have to take what you can use and discard the rest. If you don't think there's anything to be learned from published writings, you're not looking hard enough. The work of Brian Pearce and Dave Scovill of Handloader Magazine is probably the best source of info on what I'm most interested in. Rifle Magazine is also excellent. John Taffin's writings as of late have become lackluster and too varied but his +30yr body of work is undeniable. Any serious shooter should have a library of old magazines containing the works of industry legends.

There are plenty of books on the subject of shooting, that are already available, to keep one busy for a lifetime. If you haven't read the works of Julian Hatcher, Charles Askins, Skeeter Skelton, Elmer Keith, Ross Seyfried, John Taffin, Brian Pearce, Bob Milek, Bill Jordan or a host of others, you probably don't know much about handgunning. I am always on the lookout for another book that may gain me some insight, however small.

Plus, as the real experts pass from the scene, we get a lot of writers who appear to have learned from "the net". I see more and more errors that would never have been made in the old days when both writers and editors knew what they were talking about.

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I agree with this and it becomes painfully obvious, on the net, who has learned everything they know one nugget at a time on the internet, from fellow internet dummies, rather than by reading printed material from a credible source. Anyone online with deep knowledge of any shooting related subject did not learn what they know by asking questions on a message board. They learned it the old fashioned way. Too many people these days are satisfied to just skim the surface and consider themselves experts.

Articles about guns are really nothing more than an extended ad, it helps to think of them as "infomercials" on paper....

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Perhaps people should not be expecting magazine articles to make their decisions for them??? I see this complaint all the time but it makes no sense. Manufacturers don't send guns for review to writers who publish negative articles. Nobody wants to buy them anyway. Bad guns are statistically insignificant so how relevant is a negative review of one bad seed??? Despite what some may think, writers do not get free guns. Manufacturers loan them out for review and writers usually get the option of buying them at wholesale price, just like anybody else.