Gun Digest Magazine Volume 41 Issue 3, March 2024
English | 88 pages | pdf | 25.24 MB
When I first started working for Gun Digest Magazine , I was having a late-night conversation with our CEO about gun content, and my vision for what this brand could become. It was a challenging and very good chat, during which he asked me, “How do you make potentially mundane gun content interesting?”
As an all-in gun enthusiast, the question initially struck me as damn near offensive. After all, guns, by their very nature, are interesting. How each works is interesting. Learning about how to get that bullet to go exactly where we want it is interesting. They’re guns, duh!
But to his point, what can be said about, say, a Glock 19—perhaps the most functionally and visually uninspiring handgun ever created (albeit one of the most popular)—that hasn’t already been said?
Of course, there’s no single answer to that question, and so much of the influence firearms have in our lives is felt, not described. And, just like that, there was my answer: emotional value.
I’ve written in these pages many times about the Mossberg 500 Bantam .410 bore that my daughter used to tag her first turkey, or the M61 Winchester .22 LR my grandma gave to me when I was a kid. From a monetary perspective, those guns aren’t worth much, but in my eyes, that’s irrelevant; I’d never sell either. I’m too emotionally attached.
Sometimes, the emotional value of a gun doesn’t even need to be “direct” to make that firearm interesting. Take, for example, the Springfield M1903 highlighted on the cover of this issue.
The historical role that gun played in the hands of young American men on the gruesome European battlefields is incredible. Those men, and the triggers they pulled, shaped history.
I strive to keep everything Gun Digest touches hardware focused: Meaning, it’s all about the guns, ammo and optics … and how they work. But, as I see it, the emotional value of any gun is as tangible of a feature as how the trigger pulls.
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