Sangamon County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois


Tom Shafer






Trends in gun magazines

Tom Shafer's Presentation
SCRA Meeting 8/2/10
September 2010 GunNews    











Tom Shafer, all dressed up
at I-GOLD 2008.

Tom came into possession of ten boxes of gun magazines courtesy of our own Paul Ogen and explained some of the differences and trends between the magazines of a half-century ago and today.

'Do you know how hard it is to read ten boxes of gun magazines?"  He has a blister on his thumb from turning pages.

He placed them in piles and everyone present got a magazine from from 1962, 1982, and 2002.

He held up a magazine from October of 1962, another age, even for printing.  The cover was in color but rest of the pages were in black and white.

After WWII and Korea, men that had been in the wars may not have been gunners before but they certainly liked to shoot afterward. This caused a couple of different trends.

There were ads for reloading gear and even primers back in the 1960s.  Nobody advertises for primers anymore.  It's just universally accepted that if you reload, there are three dozen primer manufacturers, five dozen powder manufacturers, and over a dozen manufacturers of bullets for hand loading. The ads from 1963 were all for hand loading.  There were only two manufacturers.  There were no custom makers, no custom dies, and no component manufacturers.  They even had to advertise primers because they didn't exist.  A reloading press was $11.00.  Its phenomenal but that trend was that they had to advertise about hand loading.

Today entire magazines are devoted to hand loading and hundreds of manufacturers.  Reloading caught on because the ads worked in the early 1960's.  Also every magazine in the early 1960's had a hunting article.  There was only target shooting, collecting and hunting.  There were no self defense articles whatsoever.  This was about 1962, way before the 1968 Gun Control Act.  There were no legislative updates, no anti-gunners or even anti-gun politicians. The U.S. had three and a half million men fighting in Vietnam  and there were no Vietnam articles in the 1968 magazines whatsoever.  So they didn't even do politics in 1968.


A Guns & Ammo from 1962.

The cover of "Shooting Times", November 1963 had a big headline,"Big Gun in the Whitehouse."  It was supposed to be about Teddy Roosevelt, and how he was a huge hunter and that he founded the national parks. 

In the October 1962 issue of "Guns and Ammo" magazine there's an ad on page seven, Klein's Sporting Goods in Chicago, for a Model 1917 30.06, $29.00, pay $1.00 down and $1.51 a week.  M-1 carbines were $69.50.  An Enfield Sporter was $19.00.


Tom had previously read the Warren Report which concluded that Oswald acted alone.  The report said Oswald answered an ad in October 1962, 13 months before the Kennedy assassination.  Oswald bought his gun through the mail from a place called Klein's Sporting Goods and the ad read, 6.5 Italian rifle, $12.88.  If you wanted a scope, which Oswald did, $7.00 extra. They put the scope on and that brought it up to $19.95 for a 6.5 .mm Italian Mannlicher-Carcano service rifle.

A lot of the the older ads were about the rifles, especially the Mausers, the Springfields and the Enfields, all tremendously collectible firearms right now.  Tom worked with a man who ran a K-Mart sporting goods store in 1963 or 1964.  He told Tom that at that time they had an unlimited supply so they put them in a bin and a guy could root through them and buy whatever he wanted for $11.00 each.  That's what $11.00 would buy you in the early 1960's.  You could buy them through the mail and they sold ammo through the mail, truly a different age.

All that changed after the assassinations in 1968 and the 1968 Gun Control Act.



Guns & Ammo from 1982;
Notice any difference between
this cover and the 1962 issue.

In the 60's, there were writers like Peter Skelton. Jeff Cooper, Charles Adkins, Theo Ackley, Bob Milek, Mason Williams, and George Nonte. Tom owns all of their books and he has read them all.  These were the guys that taught him to shoot along with all the basics of firearms knowledge.  They wrote these articles in the 50's, 60's and 70's and started the trend for all the current gun writing magazines.

In 1963, one gun magazine article reported they had a new rifle coming out for the army called the M-16.  It was really controversial and they had just spent $75 million dollars on M-14 rifles. They didn't take the M-14's to Vietnam, they took the M-16 instead.  Shafer thought, "same old government, same old deal."

Modern gun magazines are all about the gun of the month, test firing a gun, self defense, etc., no hunting articles whatsoever, all slick and in color.  They are more specialized, some strictly devoted to hand loading, some to hunting, some to handguns and others to high powered rifles.

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