I started The Firearm Blog way back in June 2007. This year we will be celebrating our 10th anniversary!  The site slogan back then was “Firearms Not Politics”, as it continues to be today.

10 years ago the internet gun content landscape was very different. It was the golden era of political gun blogs, but blogs dedicated to the guns themselves were non-existent. Forgotten Weapons did not exist, nor did C&Rsenal and it would be a few weeks before hickok45 would publish his first 0:12 second video clip. I tried something new, and TFB became more popular than I would ever have imagined.

10 years later we still have the same site slogan and philosophy. The slogan is part of the site logo shown at the top of every page.

This upsets some people. I frequently get emails which state “Unless you cover [this important political issue], I will stop reading your website”.

We are well aware that our non-political stance offends certain people. We are especially aware that we lose vasts amount of traffic by not covering political events. The traffic our competitors get during major political events such as Presidential Elections is ridiculously high. Even minor events cause large spikes in traffic. While not political, we also generally avoid covering gun-negative stories such as mass shootings despite traffic from them rivaling major political events. During these periods of intense political interest, we watch the website rankings of our competitors and see their estimated traffic shoot up while TFB stays static.

TFB (and TFBTV, our Youtube channel) is about promoting guns and gun culture, we have accepted lower traffic is a consequence of us being non-political.

We do cover legal issues, lawsuits and regulations and how these affect the industry, once or twice we have even blogged about a politician or pro-gun celebrity’s firearm collection (without covering their politics), but often these are grey areas and we have to avoid overstepping the mark.

Occasionally I make the wrong call, either not covering something we should have, or covering something we should not have. All I can do is use my best judgement at the time.

Our competitors The Truth About Guns, Bearing Arms and Guns.com all offer extensive political coverage. The gun bloggers SaysUncle, View From The Porch and Shall Not Be Questioned have excellent commentary on political issues. These are the sites I visit to get my political news. If gun politics is important to you, then I recommend you read them as well.