Welcome to guns magazines golden 50th anniversary issue

Guns Magazine, Jan, 2005 by Jeff John

GUNS magazine is celebrating its 50th year and is the oldest commercially published monthly magazine dedicated to guns. This issue kicks off our Golden Jubilee year and we've planned a variety of articles to commemorate the event. But don't worry, we're not going to pack the pages with weepy, teary-eyed nostalgia about how great we were back then or fill the pages with pictures of old magazine covers, guns and dead writers. Nope, we plan on giving you the normal cutting-edge gun magazine you've come to expect each month and the nostalgia stuff will come with a twist.

Since firearms have evolved quite a bit from the inception of GUNS, each of our writers are going to compare today with the state of the art 50 years ago in somewhat Darwinian essays to explore just how far we've really come. After all, 1955 saw the introduction of the .44 Magnum and the Colt Python. Police still shot the handgun from the hip and the U.S. Army still used the M1 Garand. Civil War re-enactors used original Civil War era guns. It would be a few more years before an enterprising chappie named Val Forgett formed the Navy Arms Co. and began importing replica firearms from Italy. Westerns and cowboy guns were all the rage and Colt hadn't figured it out. A guy named Hy Hunter began making replica single actions and called them Great Westerns.

Fifty years later, another cowboy craze started with Cowboy Action Shooting and the market is now dominated by Ruger Vaqueros and Italian-made replicas (started by Val Forgett). Colt still hasn't figured it out.

This will be my first and (if you're lucky) last editorial. I'd rather write about guns so don't expect the usual editor's ponderous drivel every month. The good news is GUNS has the studious services of Mike Venturino, John Sheehan and Glen Zediker. Mike needs little introduction. His vast experience in firearms from the post-Civil War era to the present is well-known fact. John Sheehan is an experienced professional hunter and collector whose first feature on the fabled WWI Mauser 98 debuted last month. Look forward to tales of his African adventures along with more nifty WWI gun features. Glen Zediker is a High Power shooter who specializes in the AR-15 and is the author of The Competitive AR15: The Mouse That Roared and Handloading for Competition. He'll be exploring the vast array of duties the AR-15 is called upon to perform--which is everything imaginable.

A little about me. I suffered through 13 years clerking and buying for a retail gun store to gather firearm industry experience. Along the way, I became a gunmaker specializing in single-shot and lever-action rifles. That experience led me to the associate editor post at Guns & Ammo magazine. During my six-year tenure, I eventually moved to sister publications Handguns and RifleShooter as technical editor. I now bring my humble experience (read: obsessions) to FMG as editor of GUNS. Let's get to it.