UPDATE by tgirsch: It’s not just the left that thinks that Zumbo got the shaft. Here’s hoping the net minions don’t decide to ruin Faulk for failing to toe the line.

It hasn’t made a major ripple in the sane world, but in the insular and paranoid kingdom of twitchy gun freaks there’s been a shock-and-awe campaign against one of the best-known pro-gun figures around, because he deviated from jackbooted-thugs-head-shots-head-shots orthodoxy in a blog post (copied here).


Jim Zumbo is was apparently a well-known hunting media star - hunting editor for Outdoor Life magazine, contributor to many hunting publications including those of the NRA, paid endorser of gun-related products, and star of his own popular big-game hunting cable show. Barely a week ago, while on a hunting trip promoted by Remington Arms, he got into a conversation with a small-game hunter who informed him - and he claims he did not know this - that military-style semi-auto weapons with large-capacity magazines* are quite popular among prairie-dog shooters. Zumbo, being a large-bore, bolt-action manly man, thought this was unsporting, and, worse, said so on his blog on the Outdoor Life Website, posted on a Friday night from the campsite.

Before Monday, literally thousands of outraged small-bore auto-fire girly men had flooded Remington, Outdoor, his endorsement sponsors, and his cable show distributor with demands that he be fired. Before the weekend had ended, his career was destroyed: he was forced to resign from Outdoor (for which he had been writing for 45 years) and they disappeared his blog, Remington and most of his other sponsors fired him, the NRA proclaimed they would never publish or be associated with him again, and his cable show was canceled mid-season. As the week progressed, more supporters abandoned him. Again, this was within just a few days of a single blog post that they didn’t like.

What did he actually say? After 50 years of hunting experience and a lifetime career in pro-gun media, did he somehow reveal himself as a “gun banner”? The substantive passage says only this:

I call them “assault” rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I’ll go so far as to call them “terrorist” rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are “tackdrivers.”

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I’ve always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don’t use assault rifles. We’ve always been proud of our “sporting firearms.”

This really has me concerned. As hunters, we don’t need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of these weapons. To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let’s divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the praries and woods.

Hmmm . . . he doesn’t buy into the disingenuous semantical tap-dance that claims there is no such thing as an “assault rifle” or its semi-auto variation; he doesn’t think it’s good for the image of gun owners to be committed to defending weapons mostly associated with terrorists and other unlawful uses; he sympathizes with ordinary citizens who are concerned about the prevalence of large-capacity weapons designed around military objectives; and he doesn’t think a real hunter should be unable to face a prairie dog without a 30-round banana clip and a mounted bayonet. Note that he did not demand the banning of such weapons; he only expressed the opinion that they should be restricted from use in hunting. Note also that most or all states ban magazine capacities greater than 5 rounds for big-game hunting; he was essentially calling for the extension of that existing rule to small-game shooting as well. Obviously, he was hopelessly infected with sanity and had to be put down.

In less than 48 hours he had posted an abject apology, declaring he was the “best friend” of both hunters and “shooters” (non-hunting deadly weapons enthusiasts), acknowledging his complete ignorance of assault weapons (hard to believe, but possibly true), saying he hadn’t thought the issue through and had changed his mind, and promising to go assault-rifle hunting with Ted Nugent as soon as possible. (I’m not making this up.****) It did no good.

As the WaPo article points out, and as becomes clear in discussion on many blogs, there is tension in the gun community between hunters and guns-for-all-sizes “shooters”. Apparently also there is feeling that the gun manufacturing community has been aimed largely at hunters and less supportive of what an ex-Marine colleague of mine used to refer to as “gun queers” - though happy to sell weapons to both camps, of course. So some of the massive reaction (Google Zumbo and see what you get - it’s eye-popping) is a sense of betrayal by “shooters” and resentment at what they perceive has been condescending treatment to date. Part of it also is the near-panicky fear that any voice of sanity - the suggestion that there is ever a time that any weapon is not appropriate - is the camel’s nose in the tent. They savaged Zumbo because they simply cannot, politically, and, it’s obvious, in many cases psychologically, allow any hint of a differing opinion to survive. Reinforcing orthodoxy by threat both preserves their political solidity and apparently makes them feel better.

For instance, from Tom Gresham, a well-known talk-radio host on gun issues:

this attitude of “just let them take those ugly, black guns” is common among hunters and competitive shooters. Anyone with that attitude is a fool. Sit down with a hunter from England or Australia, hear him tell the story of what happened there, and watch the tears well up in his eyes . . . . A ban on black guns, or “Saturday Night Specials,” or 50-caliber rifles, is a ban on all our guns. There is no such thing as a bad gun or a good gun. We can’t throw babies off the back of the sled, thinking it will keep the wolves away from us.

And from Michael Blane, host of a popular cable show on guns:

Jim Zumbo didn’t say a single thing I haven’t heard before from other “hook and bullet” writers. Such writings and statements are, indeed, based on an ignorance of how the market is shifting.

That ignorance is dangerous. . . .

The hunting lobbying groups need to make it clear that an attack on one is an attack on all …that there is no difference between an AR-15 and a fine Perazzi shotgun when it comes to the firearms community; that the community will no longer tolerate a discussion on which baby should be thrown off the lifeboat.

The hyperbole is deranged but revealing. The invective against Zumbo is amazing enough: he is a “traitor”, “5th-columnist”, “gun-banner”, a “useful idiot” (because being a pro-gun writer is like being a Communist stooge), and, in many quarters, a “Fudd” or a “Fuddite” (I gather a reference to Elmer Fudd, and often defined as someone who “sees no relationship” between hunting and gun rights - it’s interesting how willingly gun owners will accuse other gun owners of being stupid for agreeing with them on almost but not quite everything). Blane declared - immediately upon reading Zumbo’s post, and apparently without speaking to him - that Zumbo was a “defector” and they were no longer friends. Inevitably, some people posted Zumbo’s home address and phone number and made vague threats.

But, in addition, the siege mentality within the gun culture, and the belligerence it masks, is as evident here as always. Literally within hours and with no discussion, a collective decision was made to completely destroy one of their own most admired figures for a far-from-radical statement that other leaders acknowledge was not unusual or out of the mainstream, and that he himself immediately repudiated. It wasn’t enough to demand an apology - and simply discussing the issue was out of the question. Free speech rights? Yes, but, as many, many voices pointed out, that comes with consequences - and they were determined to ensure he suffered them. Tolerance for a range of views? Not if the issue is guns. Secondary boycotts? Perfectly legitimate . . . if the issue is guns.

(A boycott was immediately instigated against Remington because Zumbo happened to be in the presence of company executives when he had the conversation that led to his blog post! Before the weekend had even ended, their CEO was begging Blane and others to make it known they had fired him. As Blane points out, probably correctly, the market strength in the gun world has tipped toward “shooters” and away from “traditionalists” and hunters, even if that’s the face they like to project to the public. Remington turned on their own endorser with vicious swiftness, since, with a limited and highly ideological market, they cannot afford the least negative publicity.)

Even more than the vengefulness that always seems so close to the surface among “shooters”, the sense of moral apocalypse is startling: acknowledging any distinction between types of guns is “throwing babies out of the lifeboat” and “throwing babies to the wolves” (guns are babies, now?). Restricting one gun type is no different from banning them all. Merely holding an uncongenial opinion (one that would be considered radically unrestrictive in most of the developed world) makes on a “traitor”, “defector”, and “5th-columnist”. Even factual description must be put through the dudgeon-wrangler before being spewed out to the critical community: a ban on some guns is a ban on all guns. (No. It’s a ban on some guns.) Zumbo is an “elitist” who hates “plastic stocks” and think all hunters should carry “wood-stocked rifles weighing 30 pounds”. (Both pictures I’ve seen of Zumbo show him displaying what is clearly a composite-stocked rifle. Sadly, it was a bolt-action and his game trophies were not rodents.)

Whatever his position on guns, in some ways Zumbo’s critics have proven him right in a more general sense: “shooters”, it seems unmistakably, truly are not restrained, sporting, or even very sane. The herd mentality that drives that culture, with its codewords, endless cliches and slogans (apparently “throwing babies to the wolves” is this year’s equivalent of “cold dead hands”), and oppressively enforced orthodoxy from the NRA down to individual blog commenters, brings their “rugged individualist” posturing into harshly-lit profile. The pervasiveness of blind either/or thinking, the bare-faced factual inaccuracies, and the insistence that every policy change or even suggestion for change is a human rights violation, makes one suspicious that there just is no factually based critical thinking going on there, still less any sense of perspective. And this view of how they treat one of their own most committed and admired figures makes one wonder what would happen if they acquired any further political power over the rest of us. And all this, remember, was an attempt to disprove Zumbo’s claim that unrestrained shooters without a sense of proportion give hunters a bad name.

Perhaps we should thank Zumbo for this demonstration of what “gun rights” is really about.

* What are commonly called “assult-type rifles”** because they are similar to, and often almost identical to, full-auto military weapons.

** Although there is no strict definition of “assault rifle”, it being more a generic family than a specific type of weapon, thus allowing gun nuts who haven’t read Wittgenstein to claim that it is impossible to identify or ban weapons of this type.***

*** Spare me.

**** I wonder what happens to people who anger the alcoholic beverage industry? Do they have to promise to immediately party hearty with Ozzie Osbourne?