Welcome to the seventh annual Ballistic’s Best Guns of the Year Awards! If it’s your first time here, buckle up, because we’re about to explain what makes this the most epic gun showdown of the year. At the end of every year, our editorial staff and content creators come together to pull off something truly wild: testing and ranking over 90 firearms on the range. (Yes, it’s as fun and chaotic as it sounds.) After crunching the scores from our multi-point system, we crown winners in nine categories, awarding them the highly coveted Ballistic’s Best trophy.

Ballistic’s Best 2024 Categories

Full-Size Handguns
Compact Handguns
1911s/2011s (this year we’ve doubled the fun with single-stack and double-stack divisions)
Revolvers
Lever-Action Rifles
Shotguns
AR-15s
Hunting Bolt-Action Rifles (two divisions separated by price points)
Precision Bolt-Action Rifles

Now, pulling this off is no small task. Imagine herding cats—except the cats are teams of experts, stacks of ammo, optics, and a bunch of firearms. It’s a logistical circus. No wonder no one else in the gun media world attempts it!

We want to give a massive shoutout to our expert team leaders and their squads of dedicated evaluators. Thanks for putting up with our endless demands, tight deadlines, and occasional “creative” ideas. You’re the real MVPs, and we couldn’t do it without you.

We’re ridiculously proud of this year’s results. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll bring you the results with a full report on each individual category. Keep your eyes peeled for the Ballistic’s Best Awards right here on AthlonOutdoors.com.

Ballistic’s Best Editors’ Choice Awards 2024

Oh, and as if our main awards weren’t enough, we’ve also got the Editors’ Choice Awards. These are for the companies and products that made us go, “Wow, now that’s cool.” We take into account a full year of covering the entire gun industry, from completely new product introductions to added value, innovation, customer demand, performance and more. So without further ado, let’s get to the good stuff! (Follow all the links for full coverage and reports!)

Manufacturer Of The Year

IWI (Wait till you see what’s coming!)

At our Rendezvous Event we had the privilege to examine some new and upcoming projects from IWI that were definitely the talk of the day. Currently, IWI makes one of the most popular bullpups on the market, the X95, modern AK variants in the Galil ACE series and their best balance in value and performance on the AR-15 market with the three Zion-15 variants. We are definitely excited for their future projects coming to compliment and improve on these three pillars.