High Velocity Generation
The shadowy silhouette of a tricked-out AR dominates your computer monitor. “Drag Parts Here” it says. Across the top of the screen are menus for upper and lower receivers, sights and optics and accessories. Everything that makes an AR. You work your way through the menus, clicking images of components and dragging them onto the outline. Slowly, the black rifle of your dreams begins to take shape. Sixteen-inch carbine barrel or 20-inch match grade? Standard hand guards, four-sided rails or free-float forearm? The decisions aren’t easy, and as you add and delete parts you must keep an eye on the ever-growing cost at the bottom, struggling to stay within budget. When you’ve finished, you’re looking at a complete picture of your custom-built AR and an inventory of everything that goes into it. One more click saves the design and dumps it into your shopping cart. Time to place your order.
Is it really that fast and easy to order a customized black rifle? At Brownells’ new AR15Builder.com website, it sure is. Designed for shop owners who want to offer custom guns without stocking storerooms full of every potential component and accessory, AR15Builder.com brings the speed and simplicity of ordering books to the tactical gun market. Suddenly, ordering a custom firearm isn’t all that different from ordering a pizza.
The Information Age has come of age, and we’re all starting to get a grip on the world of always on, constantly updated and perpetually connected. Stock prices fluctuate (mostly downward these days, it seems) in real time. Box scores of the big game are updated and player statistics are refreshed before the next play. Politicians delivering speeches are dissected, analyzed and harshly criticized online before they begin the second paragraph of their prepared remarks. We might complain about data overload, but I’ll bet a lot of readers are just like me when an info superhighway traffic jam delays my download for 15 seconds: I sit there, refreshing my page, muttering about “not having all day to wait for this garbage.” It’s not just sports scores, news and commentary that have accelerated to the speed of light, either, but discussion. Blogs have given every wannabe pundit a soapbox, and comment forums and message boards allow anyone with the motivation a chance to make a point.
It’s no great secret that many new shooters aren’t hunters. Though hunting is still alive and kicking, more and more of the new crowd consists of recreational sport shooters and those interested primarily in self-defense. Many of today’s teenagers interested in shooting have learned more about makes and models from video games than they did from their fathers. Increasingly, they get their news from the Internet, and it’s not usually from the websites of major media organizations.
When it comes to gun and outdoor publications, the old stand-bys often won’t cut it with this bunch. While some will end up as more-or-less traditional hunters and woodsmen, more are on a path that makes old-timers shake their head in wonder. Though magazines dedicated to tactical and competitive shooting are beginning to emerge, the topics have long been hot ones on the World Wide Web. And now those sites, blogs and message boards are muscling onto the scene previously monopolized by major publications. The “new media” has a million voices, and odds are everyone can find one that meets their needs.
January’s SHOT Show, the marquee event in the shooting and outdoors industry, was covered in depth by dozens of magazines with professional journalists and longtime editors. And though this coverage will undoubtedly be as good as always, it won’t hit the newsstands until March, at the earliest. By contrast, photos and reports from the show began appearing online as soon as the doors opened. Digital cameras and cell phones that pack the power of small computers have altered the journalistic landscape. The SHOT Show knows things are speeding up. New for this year was a new class of media badge, one for “Internet journalists” giving bloggers and the like most of the permissions normally reserved for traditional media professionals. Print isn’t dead, but it has a new young nephew who doesn’t like playing by the old rules.
Technology is changing the way business works, it’s changing the way the news is reported and it’s changing the way people interact. Not only is the shooting industry not immune to this change, it’s finding a new home within it. Just like everyone else, shooters want their information, their news and their purchases their way. New technologies are allowing us all to get what we want, how we want, when we want it. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
— By Shelby Murdoc