Bearing Arms contributor Tom Knighton got to take a ride in the Riding Shotgun With Charlie Stagecoach earlier this year. What’d Knighton and Cook discuss? It was a great conversation.
Tom Knighton is the longest-running active contributor to Bearing Arms. By the time Cam showed up in 2019, Knighton already had thousands of articles under his belt. Me? I’ve got maybe one-twelfth the stamina (and quantity of material) in delivering the written word that he’s got, and I dare say he should change his name from Knighton to Kington — he had over 30,000 articles the last time I tallied them up. Long-time friend to Bearing Arms (and to Cam and myself), Charlie Cook, took Tom for a ride and he dished.
The 2025 National Rifle Association Annual Meeting was held in Atlanta and that’s where Cook snagged Knighton for an interview. Knighton, traditionally reserved and very private in his personal life, opened up to Cook about becoming the Second Amendment writer he is today.
Cook’s open-ended and conversational style to interviewing gives guests an opportunity to really open up about what makes them tick. For example, when Cam took a ride with Charlie, he told an exclusive story that you’re not going to get anywhere else. When I jumped into the stagecoach, Cook got me on a rant about tobacco prohibitions. What’d Cook get out of Tom?
If you read Knighton’s bio here at Bearing Arms, you’ll see that it says he’s “a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter.” But did you know when Knighton says he’s a former newspaperman, that he was the country’s first blogger — as far as we know — who bought their own newspaper?
Knighton tells Cook about his early writing experiences in school. The first measure of success came from a gal who he said “always gave me crap.” She asked him if he wrote a story that he composed based on a writing prompt, he said he did. “She’s had all this attitude towards me,” Knighton says. When he said “yeah,” the response he got was, “that was good.” We can picture the primary school exchange in our heads as Knighton recounts the banter.
But what about that newspaper? Knighton started writing for a political blog by the time he was in high school. The leap from online blog to newspaper was “weird,” Knighton says.
“A guy with a local weekly paper [asked], ‘Hey, can I run some of your stuff … you have up on the site?’” Knighton reminisced. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure, sure.’ … Because it was already pre-published, he wasn’t paying for it, but it was the exposure thing.”
After having his blog posts syndicated in the newspaper for a while, Knighton said he approached the editor, telling him he was considering making a living through writing. The editor said that he couldn’t bring Knighton on fulltime, but that for original work, he could pay him on a freelance basis.
“After several months, he and his family decided they wanted to move back to Florida,” Knighton told Cook. “So he sold me the newspaper. So as far as I know, I’m the only — I’m the first blogger to ever buy a newspaper.”
Knighton and Cook talked all about his evolution as a writer and being brought to the Salem Media family of websites. And, eventually, how Tom ended up writing for Bearing Arms. But for all that juicy goodness, you’re just going to have to tune into Tom’s episode and hear the story from himself.
The 40-minute episode will give you a glimpse into who Tom Knighton is. Where did he come from, how did he get here? Catch Tom Knighton on Riding Shotgun With Charlie Episode #242 HERE or in the embed below.
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