Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Terry Wieland - gunwriter

Dirtfarmer,

Gun writers all work differently, but all I know became established as gun writers because they'd long been buying and using guns for quite a while. Like most businesses, you don't instantly become a gun writer (and get all those "free" hunts and guns) just by standing around hoping it might happen.

Once you do become established, occasionally somebody will give a writer a gun, but it's far less common than many people believe. More commonly the writer will be offered a discounted price, either for a factory or custom gun. For factory guns this is normally wholesale, because the gun company makes the same amount of money whether they sell it to a distributor or a gun writer.

I've bought quite a few guns this way, including a shotgun I paid $4000 for, after finding myself not being happy about sending it back after the company loaned it for an article. Right now I'm wrestling with whether I want to spend $1200 on a test rifle, or send it back. Of course in either case, the gun in question is a business expense, but it still costs money to buy business equipment, as any business owner knows. The question is whether buying the equipment will pay off in the long run. Gun writers are normally just as obsessive about guns as many Campfire members--or perhaps more so, the reason they became gun writers in the first place.

All of this is why its often just as sensible to buy used but newer guns for testing, then sell them later if you decide there aren't enough reasons to keep them. I've picked up a bunch of used rifles on the Campfire Classifieds for about the same discount price the manufacturer would have sold one to me. Some I keep, but most I write all I can about, then sell them for about the same price I bought 'em.

I've had a Heym .300 Winchester Magnum for a number of years now, and never hunted with it, but shot it a lot. I keep it primarily as a scope test rifle, because it's superbly accurate, and kicks enough to test the recoil-ruggedness of scopes. I bought it used from a friend, and could probably sell it for enough to buy at least a couple other rifles, but keep it for testing purposes.

But a lot of rifles lose their business usefulness pretty quickly. You can take them hunting a couple of times, or work up some new loads, but eventually editors grow weary of hearing about them, because most readers feel the same way. Or the gun company introduces a new model, and writing about a discontinued model isn't very useful, especially since several other gun writers wrote about the old one when it first appeared. So unless attached to a rifle for some reason--which happens--it makes more sense to send it down the road, and use the money to invest in new "business equipment." (There are a exceptions. I know one gun writer who claims to never have sold a gun in his life. I'd like to visit his safes sometime.)

All of this applies to scopes to a certain extent. Sometimes a company will give you a scope, but more often any scope worth the trouble is offered at the same sort of wholesale discount. One of the reasons I'm wrestling with whether to buy that test-rifle is there's also a recent test-scope I want to buy. To buy both I'll probably have to sell some other stuff. Will the sales/investment be worth it?

One of the unfortunate aspects of the gun writing business is, with rare exceptions, nobody gives gun writers nifty older rifles, and some magazines do like gun writers to look at "classic" rifles. I also have a collection of "obsolete" rifles, only two free because I inherited them from friends and family. I purchased all the others at prices up to several thousand dollars, partly to write about and partly because I wanted them. Some may turn out to be bad investments, because the market for writing about older guns seems to be shrinking--partly because the shooters who like older guns are dying off. My modest firearms collection is probably at least a third old guns, not just rifles but shotguns and a few handguns.

I know Terry Wieland buys old guns as well, because I've read about some, but also talked with him about latest purchase a few times, when he was super-excited over finding, say, an old Savage 99 in .38-55 in excellent condition.

One thing's for sure: Unless gun writers get really lucky in some deal for an older firearm (I know one who found an unfired Winchester lever-action made before 1890 in the rafters of an old general store in Arizona still in the box), the only way most make money is writing about guns, not selling them, because they spend too much money buying guns.

For crying out loud John, there you go posting facts again!

Jeff

Jeff, you have all the attributes!
Except maybe a little too smart!

Well Phil, that's the first time it's been suggested I have that attribute!

Jeff

He's also a good writer on shotguns. I found an interesting article, " Increasing The Bag By Decreasing The Odds", he wrote for Gray's Sporting Journal a few years back on the effectiveness of lighter loads and more open chokes. One example he gave was a wild bird pheasant hunt he was on in South Dakota using mostly the cylinder bore barrel of an older gun with Damascus barrels and 2&1/2" chambers. He's probably a lot better than average shot but it was still a good read.

You are assuming I think gunwriters are smart ?

Ummmmh. I’ve mostly liked Wieland’s scribbling but that article could just as well be entitled, “Decreasing the Bag by Increasing the Odds.”

As with all shotgunning, it depends.

The same suggestion has been made for decades by other writers, and it works a lot better for the "average" wingshot, which means they shoot very little. A wider pattern will indeed hit more birds. Whether it kills them is another question--and whether they end up in the shooter's hand depends a lot on his dog. If he has one.

JB - I sure enjoyed reading your referenced post - I always thought it would be a GREAT retirement job to work in a gun shop and get first choice on any "new" pre-owned rifles and pistols. but then, reality set in and I realized that I just couldn't afford the job.

Remember the high school algebra problem in which 5 gallons of water are going into a 10,000 gallon swimming pool and 7 gallons an hour are leaking out. How long does it take for the pool to empty?

Ha!

Yeah, I've seen that happen in other jobs. An ex sister-in-law got a job at a women's clothing store and slowly went broke in less than a year....

I've applied for the gun counter at Cabelas, Bass Pro, Gander Mountain, and our local Shyda's Gun Shop. I've never even got so much as an interview. I guess it's just as well. I'd just buy too many guns!