Today’s gun-writers are no-talent plagiarists who attempt to capitalize on an audience they think are inexperienced and unknowledgeable when it comes to firearms. Additionally, Gun magazines are nothing more than advertisement brochures for firearms the gun industry produces. Through the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, they have progressively deteriorated from technical magazines to paid advertisements. Today, they don’t even bother being technically correct. Shooting Times Magazine, at one time my favorite gun-rag, is at the top of the heap for incompetence.

Unfortunately, there is little we can do about it, hence the reason for this post. Several years ago, P.O Ackley had a similar complaint. As a side-bar, I’d love to have some of the “junk” guns from his era though.

I grabbed the latest issue of Shooting Times from my local newsstand. It seems there is a list of words for the all knowing, been there done that, seen the elephant, mystical gun-writer of today to draw from that is supposed to stymie, stupefy, astonish and bewilder the reader. The intent of course is to sell guns to the dilettante, and NEVER identify a problem with the product.

A few words I routinely see in use are: opted, proprietary, deep concealment (how is this different from “concealment”?), utilize, utilizes, rendition, and of course, the biggie, experience. These words, used time and again, are designed to give the impression the writer actually knows something about his subject.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In Layne Pearce’s May 2009 article, Loading and Shooting the .357 is a Blast, he states the .38 Special and .357 Magnum are the same caliber. While this is technically correct, it would’ve been better to say they are the same bullet diameter. Moreover, all the loads listed appear watered down.

Pearce again sticks his foot in his mouth in the Shooting Times May 2009 article Make Mine a Custom, when he says “the model 58 M&P revolver was almost impossible to control with full power .41 Magnum loads”. This contradicts everything Skeeter Skelton says about recoil in his article Fear not the Kicking Mule reprinted from 1968 in the same issue. I’ve shot many max loads through the S&W model 58, both double and single action and never found recoil excessive.

In Dan McElrath’s article Short and Still Sweet (Shooting Times, FEB 2009) he incorrectly states that the .38 S&W can be fired from .38 Special or .357 Magnum revolvers. This is not true. Try putting a .38 S&W in a S&W Model 27-2 with a recessed chamber. It won’t fit. The .38 S&W is a tapered case, not straight walled like the .38 Special and .357 Magnum. While it’s correct there might be .38 Special and .357 Magnum revolvers out there you could FORCE a .38 S&W in, this is not something a sensible person would do, or encourage doing.

McElrath also makes the argument that since most loading manuals list .357 diameter bullets for reloading the .38 S&W, then shooting a .38 S&W out of the .357 Magnum must be OK. However, the reason the load books use .357 bullets in their data for the .38 S&W is because few bullet manufacturers make a .360 bullet anymore.

McElrath’s work is not the only technically erroneous article from Shooting Times of late. No, the title of most current and qualified blooper documenter goes to J. Guthrie in his May 2009 ST article titled The Model 27 Lives. In it, Guthrie barrows what he calls a 6 inch barreled 27-2 to compare against the new 6.5 inch barrel 27 Classic. On page 54 the 27-2 he used in the comparison is definitely a 5 inch barreled gun, not a 6 inch barrel.

One thing is certain, all of this gun-writing business has been done before, by the likes of Bill Jordan, Skeeter Skelton, COL Charles Askins, Elmer Keith, Julian Hatcher, E.H. Harrison and P.O Ackley, just to name a few. Gun-writers today ride on the coat-tails of those shooting greats, who shot for both sport and work. They had real trigger time facing both bad guys and dangerous game.

“The Sheriff” Jim Wilson habitually bootleg’s Skeeter Skelton’s work. Wilson’s article titled If I Could Only Have One Gun in the September 2006 issue of Shooting Times is remarkably similar to Skelton’s prose. Again, riding on the fumes of Skelton, “The Sheriff” expounds the merits of the .357 Magnum revolver. In the article he also goes onto say how the 1911A1 solved many of his LE and personal protection needs in his lengthy career. Read the reprinted 1982 article in the FEB 2009 issue of Shooting Times by Skeeter Skelton titled Best Handguns I Ever Had. You’ll find these two articles very similar.

Another favorite gun-writer ploy is to use the following statement “I had gunsmith X make me one of these”. As if they had gunsmith X on speed dial, or living in their basement, turning out the work in a day or two while the common shooter has to wait several years for custom big name service. Undoubtedly this special treatment is due to the lofty status the gun-writer holds in the industry today.

All in all, the problems I cite here are fixable. What Shooting Times needs to fix first is hiring someone to technically proof-read the articles for both readability and technical accuracy. After that, they need to transition back to being a technical journal, focusing on both the positive and negative qualities of the gun. Maybe I should apply for the job.