By Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
Hindsight is claimed to be 20-20, and nothing is as constant as change are old maxims which, of course, are always subject to debate.
But what is not subject to discussion is the fact that this will be the last of these columns I will write for a printed edition of TheGunMag or its predecessor Gun Week. That’s because this is scheduled to be the last edition of TheGunMag which will be printed and mailed as usual. (Complete details on the future editions are contained in our Notice on Page 3 of this issue.)
What is not included in that notice is the fact that I will also be retiring from the editing business after a very long career, longer than most people are as blessed with having experienced.
I started out on a newspaper even while I was still in college, and was blessed with the opportunity to learn more after I was drafted, trained as a light infantryman, sent to the Far East Command during the Korean War and was assigned to the Pacific Stars & Stripes, the military’s newspaper for all services, not just the Army.
My fascination with guns preceded even the interest in journalism at a time in the world when no one twitched even an eyebrow over the fact that high school kids could be trusted to bring their guns to school for shooting or hunting trips after the school day ended.
A large slice of my long career is linked to the publication Gun Week. I contributed some articles to that publication back in the early 1970s when it was still being published by Amos Press in Sidney, Ohio, and the late James C. Schneider was editor.
Amos Press, which still publishes The Sidney Daily News, Lynn’s Stamp News and Coin World, started Gun Week in 1966, at the height of the anti-gun political and media frenzy of the turbulent 1960s. J. Oliver Amos was head of the company in those early days, but the spearhead for the creation of a gun politics weekly was John Amos, who was a trapshooting aficionado and concerned gun rights activist. Maybe another incentive for launching Gun Week was the fact that Sidney, Ohio, was just about 30 miles north from Vandalia, which was then and for many years the headquarters for the Amateur Trapshooting Association’s Grand American tournament. Actually, you could see the Dayton Airport runways from the Vandalia trapshooting line. Free copies of Gun Week were a fixture during the 10-days of the ATA’s Grand American.
One of the early decisions regarding Gun Week was the hiring of a gun- and gun-rights focused Texas journalist by the name of Neal Knox as an early editor of the publication. Knox did more than edit the gun news then, but as editor he traveled to Washington to testify against many of the anti-gun measures which were kicking around Capitol Hill.
Later, after Knox was replaced by Schneider, Gun Week was important to the momentous changes that swept through the National Rifle Association (NRA) in 1977, providing information, largely through news reports from inside the NRA written by Gun Week-regular columnist Gene Crum and others. The newspaper also served as an advertising conduit for messages of the grassroots insurgents known as the Federation for NRA, which led the revolt at Cincinnati at the 1977 NRA annual meetings that year.
In fact, after the Cincinnati reforms, many within NRA blamed Gun Week for causing or at least aiding the dissident NRA grassroots reformers, and the idea of the NRA buying Gun Week was bandied about in some internal discussions.
But while Gun Week had never been a big money-making publication for Amos Press, they were interested in selling the publication to someone other than the NRA. Actually, in its first years, Gun Week did make some money with four or five pages of classified advertising every week. However, that revenue had dried up after passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968.
In 1979, my brother, Vincent, sister Rina, and my wife Patricia and I got together with a number of other gun-friendly investors from around the country and formed Hawkeye Publishing to buy Gun Week from Amos and move the publication to Buffalo, NY. We naively changed the name to The New Gun Week, and I became editor in August of that year. At about that time, my daughter Peggy was working in the then-fledgling cable television industry, but joined the gun enterprise. She later became managing editor of The New Gun Week, and donned the cap of editor of the Women&Guns Magazine which had been acquired by the Second Amendment Foundation in 1990.
The Second Amendment Foundation stepped in to acquire The New Gun Week in 1985 when Hawkeye Publishing was feeling the pressure from the many changes taking placing in both the gun business and the publishing field. I remained as editor and also was elected to the Second Amendment Foundation’s Board of Trustees.
I mentioned earlier that change is one of the constants of existence, and the changes to the publishing field have been incredibly profound during my editing career.
I had started out in the era of hot type when newspaper stories were set in Linotype and headlines in Ludlow, Back then, photos and other art had to be made into engravings and the combinations were hand-assembled on chases to be matted for printing. Photos then were sent over the wires.
But letterpress printing has been replaced by a whole new generation of offset presses, and the Internet had created a whole new communications environment. Some old newspaper and magazines favorite have either been shut down entirely or had their publication schedules curtailed. And when the Foundation discontinued the Gun Week title in 2011, we did so with the idea that eventually we would convert entirely to the cyber world of the Internet. Thus, while TheGunMag.com print editions end with this copy, TheGunMag.Com lives on as an important source of gun news. I will be retiring after a long career, and Dave Workman will be editing the website.
I close now with a special thank you to Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, and publisher of TheGunMag.com, who provided help when needed and kept his hands off when it wasn’t.
