by David Yamane is celebrating his 10th anniversary of starting the Gun Culture 2.0 Blog. He notes that since that start in 2012, he has had over 500,000 visitors and a million pageviews. In my humble opinion, the reason he has had that success is because he puts out good stuff.
He notes in his first post that until he was 42 years old he had neither handled nor shot a firearm. Since then:
When I began this blog, I was quite new to guns and gun culture. In fact, part of the reason I started this blog was that I was so new to the study of guns that I had no scholarly standing to speak on the issue.
Since then, I have logged 799.5 hours of field observation of organized gun events (especially gun training), not including hundreds of hours of television programs, DVDs, and streaming videos I have watched, podcasts I have listened to or participated in, mundane visits to gun ranges and stores, class field trips to the gun store/range, and so on.
We need people like David. First because he is a respected academic at a major university doing serious research on the gun culture and doing it without looking at us like we are some strange species. Second because his innate curiosity has led him to investigate and experience the gun culture in all its various permutations. Finally because he is an all-around nice guy who appreciates fine whiskey, good food, interesting books, and good guns.
Somewhere along the way, despite a late start, he has become one of us and we are better for it.
Writing this reminded me that I had my own blogiversary on Friday and I had totally forgotten about it. It was my 12th. Regardless, 10th or 12th, that is a long time in blog years. I look at my blogroll and see how many of the blogs that I used to read regularly are no more. That does sadden me as I love blogs and blogging. Podcasts, YouTube videos, and other social media formats are fine but nothing for me beats researching a topic and then writing about it.