By Dan Shea
This issue is jumping ahead to Volume 16, Number 1. This represents January, February, and March of 2012 (even though you received the January and February 2012 issues already). We’re doing this nomenclature change right now for a variety of reasons.
We started this magazine in 1997 when the internet was a mere gleam in Al Gore’s eye – long before every one of you had a high-speed internet connection. Continuing to publish a monthly paper-and-ink magazine in the internet era is like trying to make a Minigun work with Civil War mini-ball, or shooting your M16 with Cordite ammo. We are going to massively increase our on-line presence specifically for our subscribers, but that means we will have to reduce the publication schedule of the paper-and-ink magazine that you still enjoy reading. We will now be publishing the magazine quarterly, so that we can provide more frequent articles to our website.
Basically, we’re changing Small Arms Review to a quarterly magazine, with a weekly online magazine as a bonus, or vice versa depending on your perspective. SAR will be much more timely, be a better resource for researchers and readers, and get our reports to you as quickly as possible. You’ll be getting new articles every week! And, this means we can address the NFA and world issues of the day immediately through our bloggers.
In order to streamline things further, this means that the magazine will now be published by Chipotle Publishing LLC, which used to publish only our international military magazine Small Arms Defense Journal.
We chose this opportunity to make this magazine even better, and much more modern. Jeff Zimba will continue the layout of SAR, Robert Segel is the Senior Editor as always, so both of their influence on content will continue. Debbie and I and “The Usual Suspects” will keep bringing you the best in small arms information. The online version is being done at our facility in Las Vegas area
As a subscriber to SAR, you’ll be receiving this quarterly magazine, much larger than the old monthly SAR, and you’ll also be given an online subscription to the weekly e-zine www.smallarmsoftheworld.com . This new website has many hundreds of small arms articles by your favorite authors on file. Additionally, you will receive new weekly articles and your quarterly magazine is added online for your reading on your computer, Ipad, or even your Kindle. The day we ship the magazine, it’s put online. It’s all searchable, and it includes many thousands of photos for your reference, as well as gunsmith videos we are working on for the subscribers. This online resource will continue to grow in leaps and bounds, as we put the LMO Archives online; hundreds of thousands of photos, manuals and research documents will all be available to subscribers. We’ll be adding thousands of historical articles as time permits. It’s a work in progress, so we hope you’ll be patient with us while we try to take all of the institutionalized knowledge of small arms here and make it permanently available online – this includes much of the photography and research of Colonel Chinn, Colonel Jarrett, Dolf Goldsmith, Dan Musgrave, Tom Nelson, and many other research libraries stored at LMO. As a loyal SAR subscriber, you’ll have access to resources you’ve never dreamed of…
The yearly subscription rate is $39.95 for the magazine alone, and $19.95 for the online magazine alone. The combined subscription is $49.95 per year . If you’re a paid subscriber, you will receive the same time period you’ve paid for even though you had a reduced rate. So, if you’ve paid for 24 months of SAR as a monthly magazine and have 15 months left, you’ll receive 15 months of the online access, and 15 months of the quarterly magazine.
You should be receiving the information you need to switch your online subscription on and install your password. The online magazine will be growing exponentially, we have hundreds of thousands of images and testing documents as well as manuals we will be putting on the site.
We thank you in advance for your patience, and hope you enjoy our new look and the new online service. It should help us develop a resource for you well into this new century.
-Dan & Debbie Shea
| This article first appeared in Small Arms Review V16N1 (March 2012) |
