Tag Archives: American Rifleman

Shooting Illustrated Prints Final Issue, Ends 25 Year Run

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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.

In 2020, Field & Stream, the outdoor magazine that first appeared in 1871, ceased publication of its print edition but recently reemerged after a three-year hiatus under new ownership– so never say never! (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)

So are print gun magazines dead?

Our friend Ian McCollum opines on that question, below.

A marksman’s rifle donated for war, sent back in peace

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Maj. Hession’s rifle served him well in competition for over 30 years, then was loaned to the British to help Londoners from learning German in WWII. (Photo: National Firearms Museum)

Maj. Hession’s rifle served him well in competition for over 30 years, then was loaned to the British to help Londoners from learning German in WWII. (Photo: National Firearms Museum)

Canadian-born U.S. Army Major John W. “Jack” Hession was a rock star of the shooting world in the 1900s but when Britain needed rifles in World War II, he sent his very best, only asking it be returned after things quieted down.

Hession, born in 1877, was an Army ordnance officer assigned to inspect weapons for the military at Remington Arms and later at Winchester and his cartouche inspector’s mark is well-known on martial guns of that era.

Besides his day job, he was a master long-range and small bore sharpshooter who competed in the 1908 London Olympics, set a world record for an 800 yard shot at Camp Perry the next year by shooting 57 consecutive bulls-eyes (that’s fifty-seven), winning the Marine Corps Cup in 1913, picking up the Wimbledon Cup in 1919 and 1932, and so on and so forth.

MajHession2

In all, he participated in 500 major competitions in the course of his life and is remembered as an excellent marksman to this day.

Well in 1940, with the British Army losing most of its equipment in the evacuation from Dunkirk, an urgent call was sent out for arms to equip the new Home Guard being prepared to resist a German invasion. With that, in November 1940 the National Rifle Association’s American Rifleman magazine ran an ad placed by the American Committee for the Defense of British Homes asking for guns to be donated as often and as soon as possible.

send-a-gun nra dunkirk home guardAnd in response, Hession sent his match-grade M1903 Springfield. Built in 1905, the bolt-action .30-06 had a 30-inch barrel and Stevens scope installed. A trophy and veteran rifle that had served him well, it was adorned with brass plates denoting its use in dozens of competitions.

Before it shipped to the UK along with over 7,000 other weapons collected, Hession added one more plate, one that simply read, “For obvious reasons the return of this rifle after Germany is defeated would be deeply appreciated.”

Hession himself, then in his 60s and retired from active duty, remained at his civilian job at Winchester and helped the war effort from there.

Sometime after Hitler was crushed the Hession rifle did come back home.

HessionObit

While the great rifleman passed in 1961, novelist Robert A. Heinlein, famous for Starship Troopers, later picked up the gun and even mentioned a similar ‘1903 in his work, Number of the Beast and it eventually ended up in the National Firearms Museum in Fairfax, Virginia where it rests today.

This post mirrored from my column at Guns.com