While I seldom involve myself in the great gun blogging community shenanigans there are events that do occur that I feel are newsworthy. One of my favorite bloggers to read, Linoge over at Walls of the City, has announced that he’s ducking out of the game. I will miss his writings but I understand his reasoning:
Now that we have gotten the stuff you do not care about out of the way, on to the things you might care about. As you may have noticed, I did not update this site for over a week, and, honestly, you had better get used to it. In addition to typing being a literal pain, I do this whole “weblogging” thing for me, not you, and, frankly, it has stopped being fun. I am tired of defending my Constitutionally-protected human rights from people who do not give a damn about my rights, me as a human being, or anything except their need to feel good, acquire power, or both. I am tired of watching my country be actively destroyed, knowing that nothing I can say or do will realistically change the outcome. I am tired of dealing with the passive-aggressive frakwits, back-stabbing, elitist prats, and/or self-appointed, petty gods-in-their-own-minds who seem to be infesting the gunblogging community these days… which, probably, was inevitable once it started moving from “community” to “industry”.
I went through this same phase some time ago. There is only so much one can say regarding guns and gun rights until they begin repeating themselves. At one point you eventually counter every argument advocates of gun control can bring forth (they seldom develop new arguments after all) and are left regurgitating the same stuff you’ve written 100 times before whenever some zealot who hates your guts for the sole reason that you disagree with their belief slithers across your path. Repetition sucks the fun out of life, especially when you’re repeating unpleasant encounters with people who hate you because you’re you. Such annoyances are amplified when people who claim to be part of your community begin moving against you.
Unless you’re being paid to write the burden of repetition eventually becomes greater than the joy attained from writing. Reaching this point, along with gaining a new understanding of statism, is what caused me to shift my focus from writing primarily about guns and gun rights to writing material about anarchism, alternatives to statist environmentalism, online privacy and security, etc. I enjoy writing but I don’t enjoy many of the side effects of writing about guns and gun rights. Between gun control advocates who want us dead and infighting within the gun rights community it can be a pain in the ass to blog about guns.
I’m surprised the blogger burnout rate isn’t higher in all honesty. There are some downright nasty individuals in the gun control movement and many very opinionated individuals in the gun rights movement. In such an environment stress can build quickly and fun can cease to exist. Did I mention that the pay sucks?
Good news that was an onld post and while he is not as prolific as you are or the rate he was going, he still makes a post every day or so, and with the state his pinky has been in since well before that post until quite recently that was fairly decent of him.
I think burnout is higher than either of us give it credit for, but I think most people just go about it differently than I am. A lot of people I know have been tapering off their blogging in general, and their blogging about firearms in specific, over the past few months, but have made no real announcement or anything about it, so no one really notices. I have to wonder if the highwater mark for gunblogging has passed.
That said, thanks for the kind words, and while I wish I could guarantee I would be back, there at least is a chance in the future.
Speaking of, Zerg539, 90% of the posts since the one Chris references were written before the post Chris references. I used to be a prolific bastard, and that inertia is still carrying me forward. That is only going to last just into next month, though.