Fouling Shots

Perhaps, like me, you enjoy picking up an old gun magazine from thirty, fifty or a hundred years ago and seeing what was important, what was attractive to shooters of another era. Sure, there’s a bit of wistful fascination in seeing new rifles in old magazines advertised for $31.99 or new revolvers selling for $17.95, but we forget for a moment that back in whatever day, thirty bucks was a week’s pay. Still, it’s entertaining to dream about taking a couple of hundred inflated 2026 dollars back to 1926 to buy a handful of new Colts or Winchesters, or back to 1986 to buy a crate of military surplus Swedish Mausers, with some paycheck left over.

More than that, however, perusing or skimming old gun magazines, reading between the lines, we can absorb a bit of American culture of the day. I don’t say “gun culture” because there was no such thing further back, we read; there were guns, and people who used them as just another be-careful tool, like a chainsaw or an ax, and there were also afficionados and competition shooters and collectors, the same as today. “Gun culture” is a late twentieth-century term deliberately coined to present gun owners as a dangerous subculture outside the social norm; it is a derogatory label intended to provoke fear among those outside the “culture” for reasons you already know.

The more I peruse these old gun magazines, the more I perceive fear having become a central tenet of American culture regarding firearms today. Looking backward in the oldest gun magazines, I find few expressions of fear, but that changed over time, creeping into gun magazines sometime around the 1970s.

That is perhaps best illustrated in the 1950s advertisement presented here, a smiling family, children holding a rifle and a target, promoting competition shooting as wholesome family entertainment. Back then, ads routinely showed happy, satisfied people enjoying their sport and hobby: a doctor recommending a specific rimfire ammunition to a patient, suited businessmen discussing the merits of a pistol, competition shooters comparing targets, a happy husband unwrapping a new rifle under a Christmas tree. Compare those to many ad images today depicting grim, even scowling, armed men; pedestrians warily scanning a city alley in passing; and endless depictions of armored, not-police, not-military men pointing laser- and red-dot-equipped tactical Close Quarters Battle (CQB) carbines at unseen off-page threats. All is fear-based imagery and has become the norm.

If we consider the 1950s ad as the baseline, we can clearly see how the messages have changed from positive to negative, from pleasure to fear. What has happened that caused the image of guns within our magazines to have evolved from one of wholesome family bonding to one of fear? The answer may be complex; some post-grad sociology major could probably write a boring and massively passive voice thesis on the subject. Perhaps the old, happy imagery is really just an illusion. If so, then maybe today’s fear-based imagery is an illusion as well, rather than a true reflection of our attitudes. Or maybe I’m just reading too much into the whole thing.

Switching gears to another change, though I haven’t yet heard the term, “silencer culture” (eyes rolling here) from the anti-civil-rights crowd, we are, unsurprisingly, hearing its fearful squawking opposed to removing suppressors from the list of regulated items in the National Firearms Act of 1934, which is hopefully a done deal by the time you read this.

“Silencers sure got popular all of a sudden,” a non-shooter relative recently commented to me. “Looks like manufacturers really saw this one coming.”

“No, manufacturers didn’t see it coming; they created the present popularity,” I said, and I ticked off on my fingers for him the several factors at play:

• Suppressors never should have been included in the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA), which was a supposed crime-control measure intended to keep machine guns and short-barreled shotguns out of the hands of criminals. In researching the background of the NFA, it appears suppressors were included late during Congressional NFA discussions at the request of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which feared they would be used for poaching wildlife.

• The $200 suppressor transfer tax in 1934 equates to $4,635 today, and it was deliberately intended to essentially ban suppressors by placing the cost of the tax well out of reach of ordinary Americans, especially during the Great Depression, when the average American annual salary was about $1,125. Your mental math is correct: that was four years’ annual pay for government permission to buy a suppressor. Though it sounds kooky to say anything positive about inflation, that $200 transfer tax never increased with inflation, so it’s hardly more than pocket change in 2026.

• Uncharacteristically holding up British firearms laws as a positive example (tongue-in-cheek, I have reminded English friends that America fought two wars against the British because we don’t want to be like them) suppressor use across the pond is viewed as a courtesy to non-shooters/non-hunters, and they are easily purchased right off the shelf, no onerous paperwork and long waits. (I recently bought two 1980-era 22 Long Rifle bolt action CZ Brno rifles, part of a shipment from a UK gun club, and both are threaded for suppressors.)

• Suppressors were not popular here until the firearms industry and hunting/conservation organizations began convincing state game and fish departments to allow their use for hunting. This has been a major influencer, and now 42 states allow hunting with suppressors.

• Promoting suppressors as hearing protection – and they are – allows lawmakers to argue on the side of promoting public safety.

• The biggest factor driving suppressor popularity is pure, good ol’ American capitalism. Like every other consumer industry, the firearms industry must keep innovating to create new demand for new products, and the suppressor fills that role beautifully. I first saw this nearly twenty years ago at the SHOT Show when a few manufacturers brought sample firearms with factory threaded barrels. Ruger back then had several rifles on display with threaded barrels, and I asked the sales representative if Ruger was going to start manufacturing suppressors; he said, “No.” Today, Ruger is marketing its own suppressors, but I reckon the sales representative wasn’t being coy because Ruger’s suppressors are actually manufactured by someone else.

Change is the only constant in life. Some changes are good, others not so much, and the rest we can discuss over coffee. I wonder, though, what an as-yet-unborn reader who picks up this magazine seventy years from now will think of us.