This is the article that led to my no longer writing for Gun World magazine, though my own choice. As mentioned on the “Welcome to Self-Defense-Handguns.com” Home page, Jan Libourel had just retired, I was looking forward to working with the new editor, he seemed like a nice guy. Okay, he obviously new very little about guns, his prior experience was actually writing articles for sailing magazines, but I figured he’d learn. Then this article was published. Compare it to the Original, Totally Honest Version, located right above it on the Free Articles page. You’ll note that in the original version, I’m not going out of my way to savage the gun, but I’m not going out of my way to be less than totally honest either. When there’s a problem, I mention it. This is called “integrity” – I mention this only because, in short order, we will see the new editor completely lacked this quality.

So, read the original version, read the published version. You will note that in the published version, anything that is well-balanced, i.e. anything that could be considered negative, has been deleted. Not only deleted, replaced with lies. The standout here is the comment that the HK sights use the same paint found “on high-end dive watches and aviation instruments” which is not only a lie, it’s completely ridiculous. A dive watch on which the display faded into blackness inside a minute after being removed from bright light would be worse than useless.

I had held off submitting my next article to this guy until the first one was published. Just in case. After seeing what he’d done to this one, I was glad I’d delayed submitting anything else. He sent me an email, “Hey, looking forward to getting the new article,” my reply was, “Well, let’s discuss what was done to the one that was just published before I send you anything else.” I bent over backwards to be polite, in reply I got a LONG, incredibly rude email. One thing he said was, “I called up HK and asked them about what you said about the sight paint, and they said it wasn’t true.” Let’s pause for a moment to think about that. If he had known anything about guns, he would have know the HK sight paint has very little light holding properties. Even people who own HKs, even people who love HKs, laugh about this fact.

Honestly, I cannot help but think he was lying about that whole “I asked HK” thing. Another thing he said, re changing the photo caption on the sight paint was, “We’ve outsourced our layout to India, and they changed that, not me.” I told that to Jan, his comment was, “That’s absurd. The outsourcing to India happened while I was still there, about two years before I retired, and we never had a single problem with them. I can’t imagine they would do that. The truth is that he changed it himself, and he doesn’t want to admit it, so he’s lying about that. What a despicable character!”

Also, I did ask why he hadn’t run the photos of Ken Hackathorn and Larry Vickers I’d supplied with the article. I mentioned it was a coup for me to get interviews with two men so well-known, and well-respected, within the firearms training community, to have them both supply photos for the article, and it was a real black eye for me when those photos weren’t run with the piece. His reply, “The photos weren’t high enough quality.” I invite you to look at those photos, which were in fact used in The Original, Totally Honest Version that Blue Press editor Mark Pixler was nice enough to lay out for me, and form your own opinion on their quality.

Of course, the story has a happy ending. Two years later, what’sizname quit his job as Gun World editor. I suspect that “quit” was another lie, and it was just cover for “You can quit before we fire you.” His comment was, “I got tired of being micromanaged.” Well, sport, maybe if you weren’t completely incompent, and lacking in gun knowledge, and bereft of honor, your bosses wouldn’t have felt the need to micromanage you.

18 years of working with Jan Libourel, never had a problem. One month of working with this loser, and I swore I’d never do it again. But that’s the difference in the level of performance between one of the great gun magazine editors ever, and what you get when dealing with an untrustworthy, lying fool.