is an era of gun developement ending

[mickbr]

I was wondering the other day with a lot of the custom gunsmiths, writers and so forth I grew up with getting on, is there are new generation coming up to replace them. Paco, Mic Mcpherson, JD Jones, Taffin etc then you got all the big game rifle smiths no longer in the game . I recall the late 90's there was a major boost in new projects thanks to the internet. Everything from AHR big game rifles, John Shorb of October country making his double 8 bore muzzleloaders to the fella who invented all those cutting edge mono-bullets. Seemed to be for 20 years there were a bunch of fellas with whole arrays of new wildcats, products or actions coming out. Maybe I am just getting older and paying less attention to this sort of news, but has it slowed down some?

[AJMD429]

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I think it is changing, for sure. There will likely always be 'classic' rifle builders, but the big interest now is in ultra-accurate chassis-based rifles, and though their building seems less geared towards the craftsman and more geared to the machinist, I think there will continue to be progress and innovation.

The tastes of generations definitely differ, although there is a spectrum. I was happy that of all the guns I've gifted to my son (including a 1911, a couple AR's, a 10/22, and so on) his second favorite is a Marlin 1894 he's considering rebarrelling to 45 Colt, and a Savage 22LR/410 over/under that is the old style with fused barrels and battered walnut stock. But on the other hand, he's also made up several extremely accurate long range bolt action rifles, and they have no walnut nor blued steel. They are not even considered worth his attention if they can't shoot an inch and a half groups at 300 yards consistently - that level of performance was something that the beautiful early-20th-Century rifles I grew up to revere could never attain in a practical-weight gun.

I'm just happy if there are going to be young people INTERESTED in shooting per se, and in hunting the wild areas as well as the cornfields and river bottoms. Because THEY will form one of the pillars of keeping our society free and with a rural perspective closer to the earth than their urban counterparts have.

[Scott Tschirhart]

You might be correct.

Post Civil War there was a lot of effort to disarm our population.

That trend seems to have reversed itself and there’s an amazing variety of guns that are available now that did not exist as far as I back as the 1980s.

Some of us are living in the past and are turned off by plastic guns that all look the same. But that seems to be the market for now.

[Bill in Oregon]

"I'm just happy if there are going to be young people INTERESTED in shooting per se, and in hunting the wild areas as well as the cornfields and river bottoms. Because THEY will form one of the pillars of keeping our society free and with a rural perspective closer to the earth than their urban counterparts have."

One word, Doc: AMEN!

[Steve in MO]

The market is always in a state of transition. The trend for the last 20 years has been ARs and polymer framed, striker fired 9mm pistols. However, shotguns are now back in vogue thanks to Mossberg and Beretta, revolvers are making a huge comeback, and there is an appreciation for the smaller .32 revolver calibers. The innovation is there, it's just not as obvious or in your face as it used to be.

[AmBraCol]

Don't know if you'd call it "development", but Jason Cloesner at Lipsey's has managed to get the manufacturers to produce guns that many of us want or at least find more interesting than the run of the mill plastic-fantastic that dominates much of the shooting world today. Then there's Tyler Gun Works with their offerings (and participation in exclusive runs for manufacturers), Skinner Sights, the fellow who's developed all kinds of grip frames for single actions (sorry I can't recall name or company at the moment). Unfortunately, much of the shooting publication world ignores such things, but it's still there. Also, there's a surge in online publications which goes hand in hand with our current information reality. It is, however, easy to miss out on a lot of this as it's no longer on the average grocery store magazine rack.

[COSteve]

Development? Possibly. Refinement? Not likely.

[Streetstar]

7mm BackCountry is an interesting piece of - Evolution?

80k lbs of pressure, steel cased, 3000 fps in a 16" barrel (so you can use a suppressor without the resulting rifle being longer than a Brown Bess) with recoil supposedly about like a 243

If it delivers on all that --- id say its much more significant than another short, fat super magnum

[AJMD429]

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One scary thing is that if there is a truly great leap in small-arms development, the government WILL try to maintain that only THEY should have the new technology, and if that new technology is so much superior as to render our old 'muskets' (or AR-15's) obsolete, WE will be screwed.