GUNS 1955-2025

ABOUT THIS ISSUE: May 2001

If you look at the magazine in 2001 versus today, it is isn’t much different, which is a compliment to those who made the changes. Many of the names you’ll recognize — Anderson, Ayoob, Bodinson, Huntington, Taffin and others. One or two behind-the-scenes folks are also still around.
The magazine did go on a bit of a diet, coming in at 80 pages.

In the Crossfire section, the letter of the month was from a reader who was greatly offended by earlier coverage of the World Sniper Championship in Arizona. The reader sarcastically wondered if the snipers were shooting targets of 10-year-old children and also managed to work in his disdain for the FBI and BATF. He closed with “… these guys inhabit that gray area between police and Gestapo.” If the gentleman is still with us, I’m sure he’s horrified that after a couple of wars, snipers are more popular than ever. There was also a letter talking about the increasing challenges of meeting Canadian firearms restrictions. This letter came two years before long gun registration became mandatory in our northern neighbor.

On the shooting side of things, Dave Anderson talked about this new .300 WSM, which was Winchester’s first new cartridge in 20 years. Little did Dave know the floodgates would soon be opened with all sorts of new factory cartridges, many focused on the growing trend of precision long-range shooting. In 2007 the 6.5 Creedmoor was unleashed on the world and rifle shooting hasn’t been the same since.

Another noteworthy news item in the issue was the intro of Hevishot, an alloy of tungsten, nickel and iron that revolutionized shotgun ammunition. Heavier than lead and hard as steel, it ushered in the era of more effective loads where even the “lowly” .410 bore is now considered a state-of-the-art turkey gun.

The Cover Gun is a movie star and one of the largest pistols in captivity — the Desert Eagle in .50 AE. Our old friend Dick Williams was the unlucky volunteer to sample the pistol’s robust recoil and he might have understated things a bit when he mentioned “the big bore semiauto does generate a lot of torque.” That’s putting it mildly!
Another interesting story is “The Aimpoint Goes Military” with the subtitle of “This rugged, high-performance red dot sight is not just for competition shooting anymore.” Indeed, it isn’t, along with its thousands of competitors.…

On the advertising side, it’s fun to use the “Mauser Index,” a comparison of prices from 1955 to today. In this Millenium-era issue, a Mauser 98K is offered for sale — through FFL only — for $295. Compare that to $14.95 (mail order) from 1963. Otherwise, the advertisements and the companies don’t look too dissimilar from today. One item of note, undoubtedly foreshadowing the future, was the GUNS Classifieds shrunk to two pages. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t challenges finding advertisers in a world where Google auctions off a billion impressions a minute and every person with a cell phone fancies themselves as some kind of “influencer.”