Shooting Illustrated Prints Final Issue, Ends 25 Year Run
In my opinion, the only decent NRA pub…
As part of a restructure and streamlining of operations, the NRA-published magazine, Shooting Illustrated, ended its run this month.
The final issue, Vol. 25 No. 1, officially the January 2026 issue, is the last for Shooting Illustrated, capping a quarter-century run.
The end was not a total surprise as the NRA had announced last October that it was ending publication of both America’s 1st Freedom and Shooting Illustrated, along with halting the Shooting Sports USA digital magazine (but not the website), and trimming the publishing of print issues of its two remaining media titles, American Hunter and American Rifleman, to “premium monthly digital editions with quarterly print issues.”
The moves came, as NRA EVP & CEO Doug Hamlin explained, to “create a leaner NRA that allows us to fight harder for our members.”
Shooting Sports Illustrated was unique in a number of ways.
When it was first released in 2001, the NRA offered a choice from four magazines available for free to members (American Rifleman, American Hunter, America’s 1st Freedom, and Woman’s Outlook) while NRAinSights was available for junior members. Meanwhile, Shooting Sports USA and Shooting Illustrated were subscription-only (you had to pay extra for them), with the latter being the only magazine in the organization’s stable that was available on newsstands. This meant that even those who weren’t NRA members would see Shooting Illustrated on magazine racks down to the gas station level. There it was, mixed in with the big boys like Guns & Ammo, the Shotgun News, and American Handgunner.
It long featured Richard Mann’s Bullet column, which first appeared in 2007, and the most recent issues carried Sheriff Jim Wilson, Steve Adelmann, Tamara Keel, Jeff Johnson, Tatiana Whitlock, Guy Sagi, and others on its masthead.
The magazine was only offered to NRA members as a journal choice after 2016.
The most current circulation figures available for Shooting Illustrated, as compiled by the Alliance for Audited Media in 2023, stood at just over 600,000. Comparatively, America’s 1st Freedom had 560,000; American Hunter, some 780,000; and American Rifleman, 1.5 million. So the math makes sense if you were going to snuff out two of the four, which two should get the ax.
The two volumes will be treasured in the collections of firearms enthusiasts. They will join the likes of print issues of Soldier of Fortune, which switched to digital only in 2016, the myriad of titles printed by Paladin Press, which closed in 2017, and even the Guns.com print magazine, which was published in 2023-24. Last November, the news came that the print editions of GUNS Magazine and American Handgunner magazine are ending after 70 years, leaving only digital issues.
Other gun publications have come and gone, then made a resurgence, such as Field & Stream, which recently returned to newsstands, and assorted titles from Harris Publications, which were down and out in 2023, then found a new home with Athlon/Bleecker Street– at least for now.
So are print gun magazines dead?
Our friend Ian McCollum opines on that question, below.