"They were the grand lions of the gun world."
Don't wax too eloquent; the old guys were full of plenty of wisdumb, themselves.
I personally think modern writing just isn't as good, since it's required by editors and processed by readers much faster now. Modern parlance is extremely terse and blunt, and honestly, not very enjoyable in quantity. This trend seems to have started around the post WWI era when cheap news journalism
really became widespread and ingrained (the 'fast-talkin, high-trousers' era). Popular authors like Hemingway were coming out of journalism, and drug the terse, dense, and unsavory* way of speaking they used with them (in contrast to guys like Melville who spent chapters describing shoes). Pretty much every writing style 'revolution' since has been rooted in
degrading or subverting prose, rather than building upon it; the result is very bland, repetitive/formulaic, and unpleasant reading unless the writer is being intentionally poetic. Old, old news articles' contents are as repetitive as anything, but are far more entertaining to read with their nearly-absurd verbosity. In fact, the more tedious the contents, the more entertaining the writing, typically.
"AR-15s and 1911s."
No joke; it's seriously getting embarrassing. A lot of these rags are actually getting close to having one (or both
) of these on every other page at this point. Car magazines have no problems writing about the zillions of different vehicles out there, especially ones their readers will never own; somehow, gun writers can only converse about F150's and Camrys
"True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read" --Pliny the Elder
TCB
*"savory" as in the taste/sensation of enjoying food; not "unseemly" as in lacking character. Hemingway's war and post-war writings were extremely stark in structure compared to the flowery language of prior eras; it is what caused his writing style to stand out so much to readers.