These “gun guys” are like someone that thinks they are a professional mechanic because they diddle themselves to a Snap-On poster.
To be fair to the many confused people in the firearms hobbies, we have to consider from where they get much of their information: gun rags.
The more I learn about firearms, the less inclined I am to pick up any gun rag, even if it comes to me completely free of charge. The amount of half-truth, obscurantist peddling of stuff that people don’t need, or more accurately, don’t need to BUY, is simply overwhelming in these magazines and periodicals.
The “fashionable” guns of the day seem to attract the most mis-information, if I can be allowed to extrapolate from what I’ve been reading from the last century. For example, it used to be that people hung on Jack O’Connor’s every word as gospel. The .270 130 grain Partition, pushed by 60gr of 4831 powder, was seen by many who hung on O’Connor’s words as entirely sufficient for hunting anything in North America.
I’ve used this exact load on a pronghorn in Nevada and see the Partition fail, coming apart into five pieces. This has reinforced my nagging suspicion that gun writers, as a rule across the decades, are paid to write, and their editors aren’t much concerned with actual, you know, *facts* - so long as the writing helps sell ad space and generate readers. And Jack O’Connor sold a lot of Winchester product in his day, as well as a lot of Nosler’s bullets.
The AR-15 is probably the hottest hobby rifle of this day, as is evidenced by the sheer amount of product aimed at the market space now. We have now the ultimate race for the bottom in the sale of “80% lowers” and so on.