I don’t subscribe to that many gun magazines.
I should subscribe to SWAT, and will when finances are better and I get around to it; right now I buy it on the newsstand. I like Claire Wolfe’s and Louis Awerbuck’s columns, and I’m also loyal to people I like. I get American Rifleman with my NRA membership. I subscribe to American Handgunner because I like a lot of the content: Taffin, Ayoob, Conner and Smith specifically. Plus, the editor of AH did me a great personal favor several years ago; he wouldn’t remember, and the story is a long one, but I feel a great deal of loyalty towards the magazine and Roy Huntington.
I also subscribed fairly recently to Precision Shooting magazine, after purchasing it off the stand at my local gun shop for a while. I find it rare when the editor’s column in a magazine is the first thing I want to read, but Dave Brennan always had something funny or profound or wise or silly to say. A lot of the articles may have been a little ahead of where I am now, but I figured they might be useful in the future. And there was always something there for me; a recent survey of scout rifles, for example, or an article on double guns, or a discussion of how to get more accuracy out of a 10/22, or…
Dave Brennan ran a swell magazine, and managed to round up a good stable of writers. If I was allowed only one gun magazine, I would have picked Precision Shooting.
I noticed in the past few weeks that I hadn’t seen an issue since October. I know some magazines do a combined year-end edition, so I wasn’t too worried. But I didn’t see a December issue, and there wasn’t one on the racks when I went to my gun shop. Did my subscription expire? Did the gun shop sell out? I thought I’d check back in early January; perhaps they were just taking the holiday season off.
Various things led me to go out to their website, and, well…apparently, I’m the last person to find out that Precision Shooting stopped publishing in October. It looks like the usual reasons were involved – that is, money.
I’ll miss it. There are a couple of books collecting some of the articles, but it just won’t be the same. Thanks, Mr. Brennan, for keeping things going as long as you did, and good luck.