It's traditional for me to start every quarter with a new message to our readers and visitors. Typically, at the beginning of a year, I make an assessment of the previous year and give you my predictions for the year to come. I ain't going to avoid this pattern for this quarter, especially since it is the first quarter of a new year but also of a new decade, so it -kind of- has a greater importance.

I have to admit that the previous year was overall the worst year of this E-zine short life. The well-known ammo shortage has affected us in the greatest. Ammo companies were not willing to spare any of their production for advertising purposes, even for writers. Why would they? Their production was pre-ordered, if not pre-paid, by their paying customers for months ahead. Why should they give out promotional ammo to publications?

As you all know though, there can be no gun reviews without ammo, so with the above shortage, we only manage to bring you only seven reviews last year. A very disappointing performance by any standard, considering that we had given you double that the previous year.

As we enter the new year though, it looks as if the ammo situation is calming down. I guess that the ammo-buying frenzy is slowly coming to an end, while we may see another surge if the one-year old Obama administration decides to introduce any country-wide laws which will affect the ability of Americans to purchase or own ammo. I do not believe this is something we'll see this year though. I think that the gun grabbers will continue their efforts, but in a much more elaborate way than the average gun owner expects, instead of directly attacking gun ownership. Taxation to the gun makers and to the ammo makers is something that can kill the industry much faster than any legal restrictions.

Anyway, our hopes for 2010 are high. I'll be visiting the SHOT Show this Sunday, so you can look forward to some Hot News from the SHOT Show floor, to start flowing in here starting Tuesday evening (January 19th), so keep coming back. And hopefully, we'll have plenty of new models to review this year, so do bookmark this site in your browser and check us out frequently. Better yet, follow us on Twitter (we are M1911ORG on Twitter) or our RSS feed at http://ezine.m1911.org/external.php?type=rss2 and be immediately informed of any new posts here.

As always, there is one thing we can promise you for sure, for this year, which is not affected by the ammo situation or any other external factors. That in this site, you will learn all the news about the M1911 pistols market. And that this site will always bring you the most honest and real gun reviews.

Happy New Year everyone and may 2010 brings to each one of you personal happiness and lots of 1911s.