Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Varmint Hunters Association bit the dust?

The fact that their site is still up, and they won't take the time to post a simple message on there, is pretty fugked up.




Clark

I wonder if they are still taking money for membership dues?

And they are still taking memberships. I got as far as entering CC info.

Was a good source of info in the day.

The early magazines were excellent. The resale price for full collections reflected it also.

Things slipped over the last few years, but I still was a member and would have continued to be at least for awhile.

Not sending out at least a mass email why they were shutting down shop shows the way things must have turned with current management.

Anybody know if they might be bought out and brought back to life or is this horse pretty much dead?

Remind me, did they ever offer DVDs of all prior issues?

I felt this same sense of loss and anger over Precision Shooting. But I knew they were a niche publication and probably no longer necessary to fulfill their original mission of providing communication among bench-resters.

What irked me about Precision Shooting was the failure to produce a DVD library of prior issues. It represented a tremendous resource, well worth preserving and should have provided a shot in the arm financially.

I keep hoping such a thing might materialize, but when an organization rides itself into the ground to the point it can't meet its obligations there are creditors in the wings waiting to seize any visible asset or income stream. That pretty well removes any incentive to preserve the material.

In the past, if your subscribed periodical went belly up you'd usually see your subscription fulfilled by another publication. I don't know if that was some legal protection required of subscription periodicals or if the succeeding periodical saw value in adding subscribers that way.

I'd like to see copyright protection limited for defunct periodicals. Maybe copyright should be effective only for a limited time after the failure of a periodical unless someone acquires it and puts it back into distribution. That way the information value of prior material could be preserved by third parties instead of just being laid to waste.

Of course, it isn't as simple as all that when you had publications like both VH and PS that sometimes ran articles with the copyright retained by the author.

Sorry to hear VHA no longer is.

I used to be a member -- have a few membership patches around here somewhere. And I wrote a piece for the magazine once, called "Death in the Long Fingers" (hat-tip to Capstick). I even got a cartoonist friend of mine to draw the cartoon. Hope those were the days people think it was a good magazine. And maybe that someone remembers the article.

And yes, as GunReader said, many of these magazines allow the writer to retain copyright. Maybe I should send this out somewhere again.

Steve.

I agree, precision shooting was one of a kind resource like none other. I still miss it, the last few years was downhill and the writing was on the wall.

Mule Deer: Well I am sad to hear that bad news regarding the Varmint Hunters Association becoming defunct!
I was with them from day one and eventually became Life Member #187.
I actually have a full collection of their VHA magazine issues and some of the pre-VHA magazines (called Varmint Hunters International - or something like that)!
Again sad to see them go under - they were a good group - I got to attend a couple of their annual meetings and partake of that fun there in the heat of S.D.
Sheesh.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

I was a huge fan of the VHA for years, when Steve Timm was invited to leave the publication took a steady decline. When they brought LP Brezny on the VHA fell off a cliff and I completely lost interest.

A couple huge blunders like this led to their demise.

LP Brezny (LPB) did to VHM what LBJ did to America.