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A pro-gun article in…Elle Magazine?

It starts off slow and it’s kinda long, but well worth the read. A couple of pull quotes:

On terminology:

For hands-on shooting practice, we separate into three groups: pistols, shotguns, and rifles. On my way to the pistol instruction area, I stop to ask a tall man with an NRA belt buckle for directions. “The handgun clinic is that way,” he says, pointing over my head.

“I’m looking for pistols,” I say.

“Honey,” he tells me, with an indulgent smile, “pistols are handguns.”

On that first time shooter experience:

My first thought is, I can’t believe how loud that was. I’m wearing earplugs, but you don’t just hear the firecracker noise in your ears; you feel it with your whole body. Even if, like me, you’ve never handled a gun, they figure so heavily in the entertainment we watch—from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to Sarah Palin’s reality show to movie trailers and video game commercials—that firing one for the first time is a weird combination of startling and banal. Guns are (pardon the pun) loaded with so much cultural baggage that you think you know what to expect. You don’t. TV gunshots sound and act no more like real gunshots than construction-paper snowflakes resemble real snowflakes.

My next thought is, I want to do that again!

All this comes from a woman who grew up in Chicago and has lived in LA and NYC.

In response to me asking how, exactly, I should gain experience if he would bar me from attending, Paul Helinski says:

As I explained, NSSF should have a dual press system, where those with actual readers go to range day and have access to a press room, and others can get into the show. Everything you need is on the show floor, including experts to interview on products, and there is free wifi in the building, and plenty of seats (thanks to NSSF listening to visitors and giving them tons more space).

So, apparently there is no value in going to the media only events. If it offends him so much that bloggers get media credentials, then perhaps he should stop going to the media events. He also refers to media as “we” or “us” so clearly he thinks he’s attending SHOT in a media capacity, not in a vendor capacity.

Exactly the point. You are a wanna be internet media professional. Why don’t you go into Compete.com and compare gunsamerica.com to any other gun website, not just blogs. You’ve never heard of us, and we are the industry leader in internet readership, after 15 years of hard work and dedication. Why should I have to wait for you to finish taking a video with your phone at range day?

Ah. Now I see. You want to be more specialer than us icky bloggers. Note he says “internet readership” and he’s been saying all along he’s an internet journalist. If he were complaining as a vendor or buyer, that would be an entirely different kind of stupid.

Since he likes to harp on the fact that the commercial site GunsAmerica.com has high rankings from arbitrary sites like Compete.com (which, until today, I’d never heard of) and Alexa, let’s see how his internet journalist site–or what the rest of us would call a “blog”
–fares. My arbitrary metric?

Google Reader. Here are the subscriber numbers for this site, which has been open for about 5 months:

Here are the numbers for JayG’s site, open since March of 2007:

And here are the numbers for the GunsAmerica blog, “after 15 years of hard work and dedication”:

So please, tell me why you should be there with a media pass but me and JayG shouldn’t.

Refer to the people who have an audience and might link to your site “nobodies” and insinuate they are fraudsters and thieves, like Paul Helinski of GunsAmerica:

Now the question is when you are going to start qualifying internet media? We have to crawl over nobodies who can install wordpress and have nobody reading anything they write, It isn’t so hard to qualify internet media using Alexa.com and Compete.com. Why do you waste the manufacturers’ time and make the real internet media have to deal with wish I were internet journalists who are just using your stamp of approve to solicit review guns and accessories? You’ve created this giant gorilla in the room and we all have to deal with it, and you may think the industry takes your numbers seriously, but everyone sees things for what they are. If you are serious about bringing value to your exhibitors, you need to vet the press list.

In a later comment, he argues for protectionism by denying press credentials to any “internet journalist” who hasn’t been covering SHOT for years. Pulling up the ladder is always a winning strategy!

Also: What Alan said.

ETA: Just in case you were wondering, you can’t go to the SHOT show as a member of the general public:

Attendance at the SHOT Show is RESTRICTED to the shooting, hunting and outdoor trade and commercial buyers and sellers of military, law enforcement and tactical products and services ONLY. The show is not open to the public, and NO one under age 16 shall be admitted (including infants).

That’s me!

This year is the year of training for me, so I started off early. Last weekend I took the NRA CPI class put on by Leroy Farris of Farris Firearms Training in Murfreesboro, TN. It’s a two day course where you don’t learn how to shoot–you learn how to teach people to shoot.

There were about twenty of us in the class and I’m pretty sure the vast majority of students strap on a Glock as part of their day job. I made some good contacts with people who already run training facilities across Tennessee and I’ll be reaching out to them later for class offerings.

One thing I did learn is that I really need to progress from shooting for precision to shooting for speed. When I started carrying 5 years ago, I could hit a silhouette at 10 yards about 80 percent of the time. Not the x-ring, or centermass, or headshots: anywhere.

Yeah, I was pretty terrible. I’m much better now 😀

On day 2 we did a little bit of shooting and the first exercise was 6 rounds in a target about 3×5″ at probably 10 yards. We paired up and one person watched while the other shot, the point being for the non-shooter to learn to look at the gun and not the target while giving instruction. After all twenty students had put six downrange, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who made six hits. That’s probably because all I practice is slow, aimed hits at a known distance against a stationary target with no stressors present. At the LuckyGunner class by Tom Givens, I was the only student to miss an a-zone hit when we were shooting against each other. So I know what I need to work on, now.

All in all, it was a good class. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes taking new shooters. My paperwork should arrive in the next few weeks and then I can submit an application to the state to teach the Handgun Permit class. I haven’t decided if I’m actually going to do that, though.