Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters SUCKY GUN-RAGS

Ok-Ok, let's hear it! I sure do see alot of p$$ing and moaning about this areticle or that in certain mags, so I am thinking, what do you consider to be the WORST of the bunch out there? As for me, I think it to be RIFLE SHOOTER. i was given a 'script to this, and I vividly remember one issue, in which the cover gun was a CZ,and that was thier main article........yet no guns were FIRED!!!!!! the nex month, I had the cah-ola up for a Cooper, and they had an article on it....and only fired 3 sight-in rounds - SOME ARTICLE!!! the last was that in that same article there was a Layne Simpson (groan) article for a Ruger M77RSI in which he fired an unknown number of rounds across a "bowl shaped depression" of unknown distance, and even admitted that most positive comments were related to haveing the gun leaned up in his office, the commentors handling it and making said comments - need I say more?

What is the worst for y'all?

Shooting Times, G&A, F&S, Outdoor Life, etc. (American Rifleman ranks up there, too. I'd never buy that piece of horse dung outside of my NRA membership.) Fortunately I bought all of them off eBay for $10 or less for three years. I thumb through and give them away to friends, family, and co-workers. (People who don't take offense to second-rate, used mags.)

The common denominator of them all seems to a hidden advertising/shill agenda for some rather lackluster gadget/gun/caliber du jour.

Shooting Times is right behind.

I haven't been too impressed with the Wolfe stuff in Rifle lately. The latest Haviland trash about shooting at caribou with a Model 70 that he had only DRY FIRED is enough to make me reduce my Wolfe subscrition to two magazines, instead of all three. That has got to be the worst example of poor ethics and gun writer laziness I've ever seen in print. At least he could admit the stunt. I don't let anybody in my hunt camps that tries to do something like that. I would expect Dave Scovill to come down hard on that kind of behavior from an alleged "professional".

I'm dissappointed he didn't edit the entire sidebar.

I like them all, there's wheat and chaff in each one. I just eat the wheat and look over the chaff.

Glad we have them all.

Don't like them, don't buy them. Why complain here?

I know the magazines have to sell adds to fund the production but it seems like articles in Petersons publications seem to be very long ads....

All of the gun mags in recent years have gone down hill.....including the Wolfe publications.

Read the mags from 25 years ago (when Elmer keith and others from that generation were still writing) and you get 8-10 pages per article that actually had information you could use. the articles were informative and intertaining.

Today all of the magazine articles are 2-4 pages of praise for whoever is paying the bills this month. If I wanted to read an advertisment I'd look at the ads......I don't need it in an article that is supposed to be informative. The mags and writers have largely sold out to the ad men and very little useful information is included....except how "wonderful" the XYZ company's new product is.

If an article was submitted today that was informative and didn't name any products and try to sell me on them....it would never be accepted and see print (I know from personal experience this is true).

In my opinion....if I'm going to read an ad, then they should pay me to read their mag.....not the other way around.

Hmmmm . . . . .

This has been hashed out annually for years now.

Let's all have a good rant, and then get on with life.

BMT

I get alot of gun mags every month but the only one I usually read all of is handloader and most of rifle and Sucessful hunter.
Most of the others get quickly gone through and get put in a stack to get used for bullet testing.

You must be passionate about this subject since we got two threads going at once.

Maybe its a simple matter of redundence.How many articles on " Rifles and load for Whitetails "can be written and read before they all run together.Or maybe its all these new fangled short mags, ultra mags and plain ol'mags that really wont do anything the others wont, or the same writers who bash .30-30 class rounds whooping it up for new stuff thats the same power levels.additionally , do we really need any new cartridges other than to have something new? Whats a gun writer to do? I do agree that the least they could do is to shoot more than they write!

I bought Shooting Times for 1 yr because of the price. Never again even at $8 yr. The latest issue was about the guns in Iraq.
Big deal. Every mag except the wolfe guys have done this. And how many articles on over $1000 1911s do we need?

For me its Handloader, Rifle, and Successful Hunter. These guys get my money.

Now if they could just expand a little and add Wayne Van Zwoll...

I can read most any of them, and do get most. I'll let the G&A and Shooting Times subs run out since I can get most of thier decent rifle info from rifle shooter. I respect and enjoy reading Boddington and Van Zwoll. I don't have much interest in handgunning or shotguns anymore.
I do prefer the wolfe mags these days. I'm glad I don't have to see viagra ads in thier pages.

Viagra ads would be great if properly presented. Perhaps next to an article about how stiffer barrels help you shoot better.

How many times can a writer take the latest high tech rifle with the latest and most expensive scope on top, to the far north, or Africa, or anywhere else, to test a .30 caliber 180 grain bullet shot out of the latest whiz-bang magnum at 3000 FPS?

Will this bullet do anything that a .300 H & H wouldn't do 75 years ago, or whenever it first came available?

Will the .325 WSM kill anything quicker or deader than the 8 M/M Remington Magnum did on the same type game all those many years ago.

Probably, if a person could research the older magazines, he would find that the 8 m/m Remington was tested on the same type game with the same type bullets at about the same velocity as the .325 WSM was tested with a few months ago.

I recently saw a show were joe coogan met with the legendary harry selby as part of a promotional bit for joes employer, beretta. joe was promoting a beretta semi auto rifle in 300 win mag, a huge rig and scope to boot. the thing look so out of place in africa, especially in Selby's camp. they were both trying to put their best foot forward but you could tell that it was a tough sell for them.

neither one of those chaps would carry such a rifle in the field if they could avoid it.

Do what I did. Let ALL your subscriptions expire, and just buy the magazines you want on the news stand. If this months G&A is bad (all G&A are bad lately), don't buy it. I once subscribed to Rifle, Handloader, G&A, Shooting Times, & Rifle Shooter. They're all gone now. And I had it bad for Rifle & Handloader, too. I'd renew them for 3 years at a pop. I still buy 2-3 issues a year.

Ditto. I feel the same way.

Virtually all pubs have gone to the USA Today format, as people's attentiong spans appear to be about zero now. One has to scan for text messages or instant messages about every 30 seconds. Articles are just teasers usually just regurgitating facts found on sales poop sheets. No subscriptions presently.

I will renew a lapsed Greys Sporting Journal, because their writers do excel. But they are not a gun rag.

A few months ago, just as I had picked up a Marlin 1895 45-70, Handloader had an excellent article of probably 8 or 9 pages on low, mid, and high end loads just for that rifle. Excellent article as it was filled with lots of data, and it is now filed away as reference material.

Having essentially no tactical interest, I don't even scan about 70% of the covers I see on the stands.

One thing that I think you guys maybe overlooking is the fact that over the years that you have been reading these gun magazines you have been learning. Learning from your own experiences hunting and shooting your guns and learning from reading about guns you don't own, but may own someday. So after awhile the gun writers start to overlap on their articles and you start to read stuff you just read about two years before. So therefore it's starts to get boring. Personally, I've been into guns for a long time and I don't know how these writers can come up with interesteing articles month after month. Try it yorself, sit down and think about what YOU would write about if Dave Wolfe said " Hey this month we are going to print your article ". Now at first you could come up with five, six maybe even twenty articles, but think about it sooner or later your going to run out of ideas that are of particular interest to you and at that point your going to have to tread into unknown territory. I realize that some writers are more gifted than others and I'm not defending anyone, but expecting these writers to come up with groundbreaking articles month after month is tough. I don't care who the writer is at one time or another he has written some good stuff. Even any of you guys could write at least one or two good articles if you tried, but I bet it would be on a suject that your real passionate about. I have heard that some writers are told to write about certain subject like it or not. As an example, the late Bill Jordan always seemed to write about handguns, but as I have heard he loved and was very fond of rifles, but because of his reputation with handguns that's what he had to write about. Once again, I'm not defending anyone just trying to look at this post from another angle. We are lucking that there are as many gun magazines out there that we have a selection to choose from. Any and all comments are welcomed. RRM

Notice the absence of writers responding. That's because no matter how often we try to explain or politely discuss this topic, in two weeks somebody else will post the same damn bitch and start it all over again, with the same lame observations and the same petulant whining.

Maybe it's not just magazines or writers that are sucky, huh? After all, posters keep writing about this same thing, month after month. After a while, who wants to read them?

Wanna win an easy bet? Put down ten bucks that two weeks from now, somebody else will post about how bad gun magazines/writers are. But don't bet that I'll reply to it.