What are some of the oldest "gun talk" forums?

[SteyrAUG]

I think it was 1999 when I first found HK91.com which I think was run by the same folks that ran FalFiles.

[Circle_10]

The first gun forum I was ever active on was Gunsnet/AK47.net back in like 2000/2001. The site has gone through a couple of iterations due to server issues and I think maybe a hack attack at one point, and I pretty much stopped posting there like a decade ago, but I’m always amazed by the fact that every time I pop back in there out of curiosity, I still recognize almost all of the usernames from way back in the early days. They seem to have very little turnover in membership. The old ones are still active and very few new people join.

[Ron3]

I'd forgotten about rec.guns

[FromMyColdDeadHand]

I'd forgotten about rec.guns

Before the internet truism that there is a 'porn' type for everything, there was an alt.rec.**** group for everything it seemed...

[landrvrnut22]

One of the oldest I have been a part of is called Guns and Rovers. It was started by Art Bitterman, of Aardvark Arms, a small old school gunsmith shop in North Carolina. Art was quite a guy and loved guns and old Land Rovers. The forums is still alive and well, but Art passed away due to a stroke in 2009. I've been a member there since about 2000, thought have been somewhat inactive. http://gunsandrovers.com/forum.php

[TheAlsatian]

I had dabbled on a few gun forums prior to deploying to Afghanistan in 2001, but lost those log ins. When I came back to Montana, I wasnt that interested in the tactical type forums. I mostly hung out at the 24 hour campfire and the SASS Wire. I also did keep an eye on Sturmgewehr.com.

[Nightvisionary]

Vollmer's paintball and machine gun board was the first one I remember around 1996. Subguns popped up about the same time Volmer shut down. When AR15 and FALfiles started they did not have forums, they just had specs and a few articles. I grew to hate Buddy Hinton on Sturmgewehr, his $5 "Free lunch" program, constant browbeating, and the complicated ballet unicycle riding blindfolded while juggling steps you had to do in just the right order, with just the right format, while also meeting the unwritten format rules of which any violation would result in the instant deletion without warning of carefully crafted sale ads. Posting an ad there was like trying to crack a 4 digit cipher lock while knowing half the numbers because if your ad got deleted you never knew why so you had to guess and try again until you got it right. It was not even his board yet he was raking in thousands of dollars from his "Free Lunch" program. I think the program finally came to a sudden halt after somebody turned Buddy in to the IRS for un-reported income tax violations. Buddy single handedly killed that board.

[Circle_10]

I recall Assaultweb being Gunsnet’s “nemesis” back in the old days. I never used the forum but AW was generally portrayed by the OG gunsnetters as a breeding ground for kooks, and whenever someone would register on Gunsnet and start engaging in dumbassery or spouting off the wall conspiracy theories they were often dismissed as an “Asswebber” if I remember correctly.

Ol’ Gunsnet had its own cast of characters though. Among them aspiring ATF agent and all-around hate-sink Peacemaker, fraudulent Russian paratrooper DesantnikVDV, pro-gun leftist LAGC, and “worlds biggest Obama supporter” Igor Vovkovinskiy (yes that Igor Vovkovinskiy, tallest living person in the US) and some others whose names now escape me and will remain lost to the mists of time....

[Grand58742]

Was Gecko45 exclusively on Glocktalk? That dude was a hoot.

And who could forget Gunkid on the survival boards? Tactical Wheelbarrow will eternally live in infamy.

[Firefly]

I honestly didn’t really participate in gun forums until 2010. In the early 00s, I might have looked up stuff on Yahoo. But really I wasn’t that much into guns like that. Just what I was taught in academy or classes and such.

Honestly if anything I would read Shotgun News, Small Arms Review, or Soldier of Fortune(stopped reading SoF circa 2000 though because I wasn’t an edgy teen anymore).

I might have read a few Guns magazines for toilet fodder. The usual uptalk of 1911s, some caliber argument, Mossad Ayoob acting like the Jesus Christ of Police, but usually the pretty pictures.

Honestly I was either into the underground music scene or the anime scene in the 90s; both of which have gotten lame.

Before enlightenment I had a Glock and an AR.
After enlightenment, I had a Glock and an AR