Todays gun rags are just that. Crap.

[Arizonan]

I am sure I will get lots of negative on this post. I cut my teeth on what I believe to be the best of the best when it came to gun writers. Skeeter, Milek, Sundra, Jordon, Wooters, French, Jamison, Spangenberger. These guys help mold me. Gave me direction. I read the old school guys like Elmer, Adkins, O'Connor. They were the grand lions of the gun world.
I don't care for the New writers of ttoday. Shoot. I don't like L. Simpson.L. Weshium. Use to like Boddington and Venturino back when they started out (80s). Not any more. Stopped taking Shooting Times and Guns and Ammo in 1992.
These things they put out are a joke. All ads and no substance. Let's hear your take.

 

[Mainsail]

I don't disagree.

I stopped reading them several years ago when two writers in two different stories complained about their "old eyes" and how hard it was to see the sights. What, aren't there some young guys who can write about guns? Maybe they only know text-message grammar nowadays.

 

[dook]

I quit reading them 15 years ago. I hate them for what they don't say as much as for what they do.
The internet is much better.

 

[Coop45]

We need an "AMEN" button here in the worst way.

 

[280shooter]

Yeppers, same olé stuff,..I stop buying the mags for at least 15 years,,

 

[MICHAEL T]

I stopped in late 80's When I realized they never met a gun they disliked ,and they liked it even more when company had a full page color ad.
How many great reviews about the new Remington pistol. Its been shown to be a lot of problems since released to public. .

 

[1911 guy]

I still read American Handgunner once in a while, it's been about a year since my last one. Hope it hasn't crashed too bad in that time.

 

[ColtPythonElite]

I have been gifted at least two different mag subscriptions for the past several years. I rarely find anything I want to read. About all they are good to me for is starting a fire in the stove.

 

[il.bill]

No one seems to have anything good to say about today's magazines, and neither do I.

Although I will read every article I come across by Massad Ayoob (mostly online, come to think of it).

 

[Phaedrus/69]

For the most part the internet is doing the same thing to gun mags that it's done to the rest of print media- it's taken a wrecking ball to it. It's easy to romanticize the "good old days" but what if it was always primarily shilling and we just didn't know better because it was the only game in town? Now if I'm interested in a new gun I don't look at the rags, I check out the gun forums. Sure there are a lot of blowhards online but there can also be wisdom in crowds. If lots of people are having FTEs with Gen 4 Glocks that's probably a thing, even if the gun mags don't say a peep about it.

Of course some of the same stuff goes on online as in the rags. Some of those guys are on the gravy train just like the print media are. A few sites (with Gunblast being the main offender I can think of off the top of my head) never find a gun they don't love.

Another problem is that hunting is in decline. The country is more urban and less rural and agrarian than in the past, and hunting isn't something that's a given like it used to be. With less kids coming up hunting and shooting it's hard to see where the next crop of great gunwriters are gonna come from. It's probably not going to be easy to make a living as an outdoor sports writer in the future.

 

[ArchAngelCD]

I used to read 9 gun mags a month but no longer. Shooting Times and Handloader are the only 2 that come to the house now.

 

[hartcreek]

I sure agree with you But once in a while you can find regional mags that still have not gone to seed.

 

[bannockburn]

The only interesting gun mag that I find worth buying is Small Arms Review.

 

[Jolly Rogers]

I personally think the microfiber rags are fine for guns...
Wait,,what?
Joe

 

[BullRunBear]

I still enjoy American Handgunner and Guns, not so much for the new gun evaluations as for the handloading, hunting, older gear, and opinion columns. The Ayoob and John Connor pieces are worth the cost of the magazines. I've let the other mags fall away.

On the other hand, I enjoy the firearms related stories in Backwoodsman. And I'm a long time subscriber to Muzzleloader, but that's as much for the gear and history as the guns.

 

[Kleanbore]

Stop and think for a moment.

The print media once played a major role in our society. We got our daily news from major newspapers, and many cities had two of them; there were almost half a dozen weekly news magazines; there were magazines for homemakers, hunters, fisherman, model airplane enthusiasts, shooters, amateur photographers, amateur builders, auto enthusiasts, and on and on.

There was a lot of demand for the print media, and to meet that demand there was a large, varied industry, that industry was funded in large part by advertising, and that industry provided livelihoods for a large number of reporters and writers.

All of the great writers of old are dead and gone, and only a very few of them have been replaced by people from a new generation. Why? The industry is a thing of the past. Why? The demand is gone. Why? New technology has largely replaced the printing press.

Are there writers as great as Jack O'Connor? Maybe, maybe not, but if there are, does anyone think for a moment that their employers would have a business reason to fund hunts with the leaders of foreign governments, as one remembers with Jack?

No, of course not.

Want to know what's going on today? Well, if Newsweek and Life Magazine were still printed, you wouldn't wait for them, would you?

Want to know about the latest about auto pistols, or automobiles? You can find out before the coffee has finished brewing, and by the way, you can brew coffee more quickly today, too.

The world has changed. There is no way for dozens of magazine authors, the thousands of newspaper reporters, and the hundreds of photojournalists to make a living in those professions today.

There were quite a few gun magazines, and there were even more "outdoor" magazines, each with its own gun editor. Now there are very few indeed.

I saw an ad for a new auto pistol in a recent and very thin edition of The American Rifleman. That's all there was on it --one small ad. But it caught my interest, and I was able to find out all I wanted to know very quickly without waiting for a magazine article about it.

Welcome to the new world. It is a world largely without major newspapers, with few magazines, and therefore, without many well known writers. If you haven't noticed, it is also a world without service station road maps.

Things have changed.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

Yep, things were always better in the past, or were they really?

Gun rags have been that for a long period of time. They might have had some more notable writers, but the biases were still there when it came to products and such.

 

[SleazyRider]

They have their place. For example, I find it very satisfying to leave them in the magazine rack of my doctor's or dentist's waiting room whenver I visit. I figure it will expose fellow patients to a wider variety of thinking than past issues of The New Yorker, Forbes, People, and other crumbs that they so generously make available for their patient's reading pleasure.

 

[TRX]

Hah. My wife's oncology clinic has a full set of subscriptions, from "Combat Handguns" to "Guns & Ammo", plus "Hot Rod" and "Car & Driver."

It was interesting to see that the gun magazines appeared to be quite popular!

I guess in the end they'll all wind up like the travel and "health" magazines, consigned to being waiting-room fodder. There seem to be a number of magazine titles that exist *only* in waiting rooms; at least, I've never seen them anywhere else.

 

[Sam Cade]

Another problem is that hunting is in decline.

It is on the rise actually. Especially among women.

Participation in hunting-related activities has risen 9 percent nation-wide from 2006 to 2011, and 11 percent for fishing, Duda said, citing figures recently released in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services survey of fishing, hunting and wildlife recreation-associated recreation.

 

[JERRY]

I occasionally read a combat handguns once in a blue moon, I use to have a subscription but let it run out when they ditched Rick Miller.

also, it seems the only guns or brands that get reviewed regularly are the ones with multiple ads in the same magazine. in short, if you don't pony up the dough for a few pages of ads, your gun will not be reviewed, or not thoroughly anyway.

 

[Joe Demko]

I miss Dean Grinnell's sense of humor and wordplay. I also miss Bill Jordan's on-the-page persona. I can't say I miss any of the others, as I'm having trouble coming up with any more names for which I have positive connotations.
There were always biases, but some magazine writers were just a lot more flagrant about it than others. Jan Libourel stands out in my memory as one who praised guns that, clearly, had serious flaws.

 

[Jaywalker]

I'm sure I bought handgun magazines of some type or another after the 1980s, but they went out in the trash pretty soon. Compare that with the older issues of magazines from 30 years ago, some of which I still have knocking around here somewhere. I bought some rifle-specific magazines within the last 10 years, mostly for the how-to articles by John Barsness, but I'm over that now, too.

The sad thing is that some gun forums have had success spoil them, too. Try criticizing some vendor or model firearm on AR15dotcom, for instance, and see how fast they can lock your thread. I hope they're an anomaly and that kind of nonsense doesn't spread.

 

[tomrkba]

I read them for the ads. I used to read for content, but now these magazines are good only to see what is coming out.

 

[Joe Demko]

One thing I especially don't miss is the misguided attempts by gun writers to write in dialect. This, most often, took the form of droppin' the "g" from gerunds and tryin' to assume the persona of a dusty ol' trailpoke. e.g. "The ________ is a straight shootin', easy packin' smokewagon you won't hafta rob Wells-Fargo to buy."
I just wanted to punch somebody....