Guns Save Life exists to defend your right to defend yourself. That’s the job. The last few months we’ve been feeding the site harder than usual, and the scoreboard finally looked back.
September 1–19: 146,800 views and 137,200 visitors. That’s up 285% and 301%. Then September 14 happened — a bar so short it looks like the intern unplugged the internet — and three days later September 17 tried to punch a hole in the roof at about 40,000 views. Somebody out there found a story and didn’t let go. Not sure what happened on September 14th, but reasonably certain it’s a software glitch not a universal boycott of the Internet day.
Now the map.
Lifetime-looking location data puts the United States first at 205,890 views. Fine. Expected. Then China walks in with 168,603. Hong Kong adds another 5,530. Singapore 4,953. Canada, Belgium, Britain, Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands trail behind like polite dinner guests who actually read the menu.
City view is where it gets weird. North Bergen, New Jersey leads the planet at 41,765. That is not a Guns Save Life chapter. That’s a story about an a-hole who got what he had coming. We said the bad guy managed to master the art of unassisted human flight.
Right behind it: Beijing at 36,923. Then, finally, people we recognize — Chicago 17,437, Naperville 12,125, Hickory Hills 11,325. After that it’s Chongqing, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing, and Hong Kong again.
We’re pretty sure a large slice of the China traffic isn’t a sudden nationwide conversion to Illinois gun-rights journalism. It’s probes. Scrapers. Bored scripts knocking on the door to see if it opens. If the People’s Liberation Army wants the latest write-up on a Springfield meeting or a FOID headache, they’re welcome to it. The articles still won’t load a magazine for them.
The useful traffic is the boring kind: someone in Naperville trying not to become a cautionary tale. Someone in Hickory Hills who needs the law explained before the law explains it to them. That’s the work. Stories that help members, friends, and families navigate life, avoid other people’s mistakes, and protect a household with more than just hardware — preparedness, knowledge, and the skills that keep good people alive.
We’ve been ramping the posting. Mr. K. has been a real help when the well runs dry. If you want more of this flavor on a faster drumbeat, go read ShootingNewsWeekly.com.
Zero likes on the September dashboard. Perfect. We didn’t build this shop to collect heart emojis. We built it so the next person who has to defend their family isn’t doing it blind.
The paper still goes in the mail. The site still goes out to the world. Some of that world is Illinois. Some of it is a data center in North Bergen pretending to be a reader. And some of it is Beijing, politely failing to hack a grassroots gun group in Savoy.
They can keep knocking. We’ll keep publishing.