TFB at 18: What Does “Firearms Not Politics” Mean in 2025?

The Firearm Blog is officially 18, which means if this website were a person, it could legally purchase a long gun. It also marks over a year since I took the reins from Pete. For the most part, I’ve been spending the past year trying hard not to screw things up, but we’ve been trying some new features like:

• Fudd Friday, where our resident fudds Zac and Sam get to share all their fuddlore every Friday.
• Small Business Spotlight, where we profile small firearm businesses every week.
• Fun listicles like “ The Guns Most Likely to Never Break Down,” “ The Top 5 Coolest-Looking Pistols,” and “ The Top 5 Handguns of 2025.”
• Helpful beginner guides like “ The Best Beginner AR-15,” “ The 10 Best Home Defense Rifles,” and “ The 5 Best All Around Rifles.”

We’ve added several new and talented writers, and we even managed to recover our Twitter account, adding a few thousand more followers in the process.

What a wild year it’s been. Only days after starting the job, President Trump was shot in Pennsylvania, with Pete giving a behind-the-scenes look at a Secret Service detail and Daniel Y. published a detailed analysis of the Secret Service gear used in the response. Daniel has since dutifully tracked the changes in the “ Big Beautiful Bill,” which unfortunately didn’t eliminate the NFA (yet), but has made owning a suppressor or SBR $200 cheaper. There’s still more to come: Gun Owners of America is hard at work trying to kill the NFA for good.

This brings me to something that’s weighed heavily on my mind for the past year. From inception, TFB’s motto has been “firearms not politics,” and I fully intend to honor it. Too many firearm and preparedness sites spiral into political commentary, losing sight of the original vision. If you want politics, there are plenty of other places to get it. All you have to do is open any other news site or social media app to get a face full of it.

Unfortunately, guns are inherently political. Elections, legislation, court rulings, and regulatory rule interpretations cast a looming shadow over all gun owners. What’s legal today may not be tomorrow—or sometimes vice-versa. In a better world, we’d just be talking about guns, but things as they are mean sometimes we have to talk about externalities as well.

So, where should we draw the line? Here are my thoughts on it. We should cover political news when it has a direct impact on gun ownership—i.e., legislation or federal rule changes that impact gun owners. Note the emphasis on direct. One political party is much friendlier to Second Amendment rights than the other, but we trust you can figure that out yourself.

In general, we should avoid treading into the political realm more than we have to, and we should avoid endorsing any candidate for political office. However, we may openly endorse specific legislation, regulation, or lawsuits that strengthen Second Amendment rights, which is something we should all agree upon.

Likewise, we’ll discuss specific firearms when they’re newsworthy. The above article about Secret Service gear is a good example. Another one would be when we covered Tim Walz’s Beretta shotgun. Some of you weren’t happy about it, but that gun was getting enough mainstream media coverage that I figured it was worth some expert analysis. (Fun fact, I originally suggested that article as a joke. Adam dutifully took it on, tongue firmly in cheek, but I think the final result was good.)

One place where I will draw the line: As long as I’m Editor-in-Chief, we will be careful not to unnecessarily give the spotlight to attention-seeking criminals, like assassins and mass shooters. Note in the case of the Trump shooting, we focused on the good guys, not the would-be assassin.

I don’t want to tie our hands too much, but I want to be transparent about our thinking here, and let you know there is a lot of thought that goes into what we choose to cover.

To wrap it up, I’d love to hear from you. What’s working here at TFB and what’s not? What do you wish we were doing? Let me know in the comments.

Happy 18 years to TFB. Here’s to 18 more.