Are The Gun Rags Hurting?

[milo z]

Reading all of this, two things occur to me:

1. Most gun reviews in mags are generally positive because most modern guns are of decent to good quality. You don't see the mags reviewing the real Jennings junkers, and those individual weapons that each of us might think is a POS is more likely an issue of personal desires and the occasional bad apple.

2. Perhaps the way forward for print media is (as someone said way back) specialization and higher-price/higher-cachet mags (think 'Rodders Journal' for firearms). A quarterly devoted solely to Glocks, people doing cool things with Glocks, etc., and one for 1911s, and particularly a real Rodders Journal equivalent for revolvers. I think there's already a high-dollar mag for shotgunners.

The Cowboy Action publications play to their niche and seem to be doing reasonably well, right? They don't have Guns and Ammo circulation, but in this world you've got to adjust expectations.

 

[mec]

There's an old axiom: Shotgun shooters-rich; Rifle and Pistol shooters-broke.

Probably some truth to it and the reason Doublegun Journal is such a slick publication. For a while, the specialty Handgun magazines were declining faster than the more general ones. Now they all seem to be rebounding fairly well.
The only magazine that made an impact reviewing "guns that suck" was the old Phil Engledrum magazine called Gun Tests ( not the current Gun Tests). He was a hotrod mag publisher and started Guntests after he saved up his money for a Smith 39 or 59 only to find out it wouldn't work. The feeling of being fundamentally screwed is only a step away from absolute, scorched earth retaliation and this is what he did. He went out and bought guns off the shelf and tested them then said truly awful things about the ones that didn't work. He call them every sort of bowell movement available in the English Language. I do believe the Engledrum publications were responsible for a long standing improvement in Gun industry quality control.

Every so often, a current gun writer will say something exceedingly wierd on a techinical subject but pumping really rotten guns is fairly rare. It doesn't do much for credibility to say that a p.o.s gun is great and shooting /writing about cheap guns is not very pleasurable. The gun magazines are not in the Ralph Nader/Consumer Reports genre. They have more to do with entertainment and sparking interest among shooters.