Month: November 2023

David Freeman

We are not all-knowing, super marksmen swimming in free guns and best buddies with the presidents of all the major gun companies.  We are, however, some of the luckiest people on the planet. You may be wondering how we came to be gunwriters. For me, it happened like this. I wrote a letter to the editor of American Handgunner and he published my letter in the next issue of the magazine. I wrote another letter and he published that one, too. Then I saw that one of the regular columnists for American Handgunner was moving on and I wrote the editor, Roy Huntington, and asked if I could take that guy’s place. Roy wrote back and said something to the effect that you can’t just become a columnist for a magazine, you have to know a lot, have industry contacts, etc. , etc. At the time I owned a gun store and I was teaching the Texas Concealed Handgun License course and the Texas Hunter’s Education course and I thought I did know lot.

So, I started a blog and put up a few articles and I sent a link to the blog to Roy. Roy wrote back and said if I could provide good pictures with the text I had on affordable carry methods, he might could use that. So I took pictures and put them and the article text on a thumb drive and mailed it to Roy. Roy said the pictures sucked, but he is a gifted mentor. He very patiently coached me through setting up a photo lab with the right camera and lighting to take magazine quality photos over the course of my first year as a writer, which was 2017.    The answer to how you get started for me it was pretty much a God thing that I found favor with Roy such that Roy saw enough potential in me that he tutored me into being a decent magazine writer. Seeing my words and pictures in print to me was sort of like Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show seeing their picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone. I was just turning 70 years old when I started getting articles published and I told people, “I am 70 years old and I finally know what I want to do with my life.” I loved it and still do. It’s hard work, but it’s fun work and the reward is recognition of your hard work by having an editor use it in a publication that goes out to thousands, if not millions of gun loving people.

There are hiccups along the way. Roy retired after turning over the reins of GUNS and American Handgunner to capable editors. As it turned out, those capable editors didn’t want my stuff. I was discouraged until I met Dave Dolbee, the editor of Cheaper Than Dirt’s blog, The Shooter’s Log. I had history with Cheaper Than Dirt, having headed up the web team that built their first website back in 1999. That’s my  current gig, writing for The Shooter’s Log and one thing I love about that is I get an article published every week instead of one a month for GUNS magazine and one every two months for American Handgunner.

The aptitude test I took in high school to help me decide what to major in when I went to college said I should be a journalist. So, I majored in journalism when I started college and immediately learned that writing was all about answering the who, what, when, where and how questions. My high school English teacher had taught me that. My assignment during the first semester journalism class was to write a story each week about the Library. Boring. I quit journalism and went to business school with the journalism professor yelling at me that I was a coward.

I churned through some interesting times in the military and in my civilian jobs which all started out with me being a company pilot but ended up with me being something else that involved computers. In every position I had, I somehow became a writer or a video producer. All of those experiences prepared me for the role of being able to write for fun and money on topics for which I have a passion. That passion is to see ordinary Americans so knowledgeable and comfortable with their firearms that they can defend themselves against anything or anybody determined to do them harm. That commitment requires me being knowledgeable about guns so I can help my clients or customers find the right gun for them and the right gun for the purpose for which it is intended. So here I am writing about guns and about using guns.

Time to talk about free guns. What free guns? Oh, I have a few. There are some companies that are very generous in distributing new models to guys like me who they know are going to promote the products in a publication that gets wide distribution. Most of the time the guns we write about come to us as loaners. After 90 days we’re expected to return them or to buy them. I’ll admit the price we are quoted is attractive enough that most of the time I buy the gun. Let’s see, the $600 gun is sold to me for $400 and the article I wrote about it pays $300, so I got a nice gun for $100. But how do I make a living with that kind of math? The answer is I don’t. I know there are some gunwriters who are making a living at it. Those writers are very prolific and very good and probably don’t buy many of the loaner guns that come their way. So, I guess you could say I write to support my gun habit. Thankfully, I have income as a firearms instructor that helps in the pay department. And there are times as a gunwriter I do pretty well. For instance when I write about guns I already own. Or write articles that are instructional in nature and which don’t require a new gun to demonstrate.

When I read some writers I see a formula, a template if you will, and they just fill in the blanks. Informative, but boring. I don’t like to write like that. I try to make my articles more like a story in which the gun plays a major role. Sometimes it works well, other times it doesn’t. There are writers who just have a gift of descriptive and entertaining words flowing out of them seemingly effortless. I’m not one of those and when I try it, I flop. My MO is to hold the gun, shoot the gun, share the gun and write about what happens. Actually, I talk about what happens and take down my own dictation. My wife worries sometimes that my talking to myself is just a sign of old age, but the fact is I talk to myself so I’ll listen and maybe do the right thing.

Let me give you an example of how I would write about a gun that hardly anybody else has written about. The gun is a Ruger New Model Blackhawk in a caliber that’s not common. I was working in the Internet department for a company that had a storefront gun store as well as an online presence. I had occasion to go the store to ask a merchandise question and as I walked by one of the counters, I saw a beautiful black revolver with a long barrel and wooden grips. It reminded me of Wyatt Earp’s Buntline Special on the TV program about Wyatt. The price tag on the gun was $300. I could do $300 and I had not bought a gun since I was 14 years old. “You do realize this is a .357 Maximum?” the salesman asked me. “Oh, yeah,” I replied as if I bought guns everyday and knew all there was to know about them. What I didn’t know was what a .357 Maximum was and so I thought he said, or meant, Mangum.

That gun, which I still have today, has taken me on a most amazing adventure of learning. The first thing I learned was the .357 Maximum round was developed by Remington and Ruger developed the New Model Blackhawk to shoot that round primarily for long range steel plate shooting. Reloaders were powering cartridges up for more performance and those heavy loads were burning a groove into the top strap on the Blackhawks. Ruger stopped making them after around 11,500 and initiated a voluntary recall on the guns that were out there. My .357 Maximum exhibits no evidence of any burning so I’m very pleased with it. That gun has served me well as a fun gun and a learning platform. I’ve used it instructionally to demonstrate the difference in recoil between a .38 Special, .357 Magnum and .357 Maximum. I’ve used it as a project gun for various refinishing projects. First, with the aid of a friend who had the tools and know-how to do it, I cut the barrel down from 10.5 inches to 6 inches. I installed a new front sight that involved soldering the sight to the barrel. I re-blued the gun, then later did a full Duracoat  job on it. I learned to reload .357 Maximum loads by modifying a .357 Magnum die set into a .357 Maximum die set. I learned to scrounge for remanufactured .357 Maximum rounds and to locate .357 Maximum brass for reloading.

This experience with the Ruger .357 Maximum began a quarter of a century ago and in the years since then I’ve been so immersed in the gun culture I’ve built up a very interesting gun collection, I’ve owned and operated a gun store, I’ve become an instructor in several disciplines and have put over 22,000 students through the Texas License to Carry course. We all have to start somewhere.

I can’t and don’t even try to review every new gun that comes out. Although I do some rifles and shotguns, I primarily concentrate on handguns. The reason for that is physical. Handling long guns while in my wheelchair is challenging but I can handle handguns just fine. When I review a gun, I try to describe it to the reader in words and pictures. I give all the dimension measurements, the weight and the capacity. I describe how it handles. Then I shoot it for accuracy and reliability. Then I clean it and describe how to take it apart for cleaning.

The photos associated with my articles are another subject entirely. When Roy Huntington first started accepting my articles, he informed me that in the gunwriting business writers were expected to provide their own photographs. Many years earlier, my dad had been a speaker in the conservation world and he had accumulated a lot of expensive photography equipment to take the slides he used along with his talks. I wasn’t interested enough then to pick his brain and when I did get interested he was no longer around. Roy coached me through the camera to buy, how to buy and set up lighting and how I could tell what made a good picture. I knew a little about composition from a video course I had taken in relation to a job I had which involved making training films. I was and still am a work in progress along those lines, but these days the IPhone and PhotoShop can do wonders with my efforts.

I now have the privilege of writing for the blog published by the company I was working for when I bought the Blackhawk with the 10-inch barrel. One of the things I enjoy the most about this gig, in addition to the great people I have the privilege of working with, is the comments section that goes with each article. I get to interact with my readers and that is so cool—even the criticisms, which I use to help improve my writing and the research behind it. This article is getting to be pretty long, so I’m going to post it and write another article about the guns I’ve carried along the way.