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| 'Terrorist' Remark Puts Outdoorsman's Career in Jeopardy | |||||||||
| 2007-02-24 | |||||||||
SEATTLE -- Modern hunters rarely become more famous than Jim Zumbo.
Zumbo's fame, however, has turned to black-bordered infamy within America's gun culture -- and his multimedia success has come undone. It all happened in the past week, after he publicly criticized the use of military-style assault rifles by hunters, especially those gunning for prairie dogs. "Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity," Zumbo wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life Web site. The Feb. 16 posting has since been taken down. "As hunters, we don't need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them. . . . I'll go so far as to call them 'terrorist' rifles."
Assault Rifles For Hunters? The reaction -- from tens of thousands of owners of assault rifles across the country, from media and manufacturers rooted in the gun business, and from the National Rifle Association -- has been swift, severe and unforgiving. Despite a profuse public apology and a vow to go hunting soon with an assault weapon, Zumbo's career appears to be over.
The NRA on Thursday pointed to the collapse of Zumbo's career as an example of what can happen to anyone, including a "fellow gun owner," who challenges the right of Americans to own or hunt with assault-style firearms. From his home near Cody, Wyo., Zumbo declined repeated telephone requests for comment. He is a 40-year NRA member and has appeared with NRA officials in 70 cities, according to his Web site. In announcing that it was suspending its professional ties with Zumbo, the NRA -- a well-financed gun lobby that for decades has fought attempts to regulate assault weapons --
Some outdoors writers drew a different lesson from Zumbo's horrible week. "This shows the zealousness of gun owners to the point of actual foolishness," said Pat Wray, a freelance outdoors writer in Corvallis, Ore., and author of "A Chukar Hunter's Companion." Wray said that what happened to Zumbo is a case study in how the NRA has trained members to attack their perceived enemies without mercy. "For so many years, Zumbo has been a voice for these people -- for hunting and for guns -- and they just turned on him in an instant," Wray said. "He apologized all over himself, and it didn't do any good."
"Jim Zumbo Outdoors" was not broadcast as scheduled last week on the Outdoor Channel and will not air next week, said Mike Hiles, a spokesman for the channel. He said sponsors have requested that they be removed from the program. The show "will be in hiatus for an undetermined period of time," he said. Zumbo's long career at Outdoor Life, which is owned by Time Inc., also came to a sudden end in the past week. Zumbo was hunting editor of the magazine, which is the nation's second-largest outdoors publication. He wrote his first story for Outdoor Life in 1962. The magazine's editor in chief, Todd W. Smith, said that Zumbo submitted his resignation after hearing of the large number of readers (about 6,000, at last count) who had sent e-mails demanding his dismissal. Smith dismissed as "conjecture" a question about whether Zumbo would have been fired had he not resigned. "Jim is a good guy, and I feel bad about this unfortunate situation," Smith said. "We are living in very delicate times. For someone to call these firearms 'terrorist' rifles, that is a flash-point word. You are painting a bunch of enthusiasts with the word. They don't like being called terrorists." When he wrote his now-notorious blog entry, Zumbo was on a coyote hunt in Wyoming sponsored by Remington, a detail he noted in the entry. That mention -- as it bounced around in recent days among a number of assault-weapon Web sites -- triggered a call for a boycott of Remington products. That prompted Remington to issue a news release, saying that it has "severed all sponsorship ties with Mr. Zumbo effective immediately."
Zumbo, in his public apology, said that when he wrote the blog entry that criticized assault rifles, he was at the end of a long day's hunt. "I was tired and exhausted," he wrote, "and I should have gone to bed early. When the guide told me that there was a "huge" following of hunters who use AR 15's and similar weapons to hunt prairies dogs, I was amazed. At that point I wrote the blog, and never thought it through. "Now then, you might not believe what I have to say, but I hope you do. How is it that Zumbo, who has been hunting for more than 50 years, is totally ignorant about these types of guns. I don't know. I shot one once at a target last year, and thought it was cool, but I never considered using one for hunting. I had absolutely no idea how vast the numbers of folks are who use them. I never intended to be divisive... ...What really bothers me are some of the unpatriotic comments leveled at me. I fly the flag 365 days a year in my front yard. Last year, through an essay contest, I hosted a soldier wounded in Iraq to a free hunt in Botswana. This year, through another essay contest, I'm taking two more soldiers on a free moose and elk hunt. ...Believe it or not, I'm your best friend if you're a hunter or shooter, though it might not seem that way. I simply screwed up...
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| Posted by:Steve |
| #10 TITLE 10 > Subtitle A > PART I > CHAPTER 13 > § 311 § 311. Militia: composition and classes (a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard. (b) The classes of the militia are— (1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia. It take a true liar to pervert the very words of the Constitution to rationalize that this is not what the founding father meant to protect by the 2d Amendment. Since both the M-16 and the AK-47 are pretty much the basic firearm of military forces worldwide, the only implication can be that ownership of said weapons is protected until the Constitution is so altered by legal amendment. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2007-02-24 22:16 |
| #9 They came first for the mail order gun sales, and I didn't speak up because I bought mine locally Then they came for the “cop killer bullets”, and I didn't speak up because I didn’t buy them. Then they came for the “Saturday Night Specials”, and I didn't speak up because I bought expensive guns. Then they came for the “Plastic Guns”, and I didn't speak up because I had steel ones. Then they came for the “Assault Weapons”, And I didn’t speak up because I was a hunter. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up. |
| Posted by: Steve 2007-02-24 17:56 |
| #8 Further thoughts-- and some damn good ones-- from Kim du Toit here and here. In the first link he does a good job of showing the lack of any important functional differences between hunting firearms and those Evil Black Rifles that Zumbo was tut-tutting about. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2007-02-24 17:11 |
| #7 Incredible eruption of pissed-off, had-enough gun owners took place less than a week ago. Now that it has almost reached the national stage my best guess is that gun writers et al have are likely paying much, much closer attention to what they write. And in all this, one clear message: You want to ban guns, best polish up your resume. It is now considered career suicide. And the idea: that an assault weapon is nothing more that a terrorist firearm: what possessed Zumbo to utter such foolishness? Did it feel good, Zumbo? |
| Posted by: badanov 2007-02-24 16:45 |
| #6 Zumbo really stepped in shit with this one. Tamara K., never one to suffer idiocy lightly, rips Zumbo a new orifice here, in Who the hell is Jim Zumbo? and reams it out a little more here in Can open. Worms everywhere. She does a nice summing-up-- with a VERY pointed lesson in the power of the blogosphere-- in An Army of Davids, illustrated. I have no idea WTF Zumbo was using for brains when he wrote that column. I've encountered hints of his sniffy kind of anti-AR snobbery before in hunters from time to time; my best guess is they consider Black Rifle enthusiasts reckless extremists who'll "ruin everything" for those oh-so-gentlemanly hunters. What they don't seem to get through their thick skulls is that banning the sale of AR-type guns is just a prelude to banning the sale of **ALL** guns, then confiscating the whole lot. Because the Constitution, AFAIK, doesn't say Jack Shit about any "right to hunt". If they can take away my ARs, and the ban is upheld by the USSC, there is no logical barrier to their confiscation of anything that can fire a bullet. Like the AoS said: enjoy your free time, Zumbo. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2007-02-24 16:43 |
| #5 Gun is just a tool. Much depends on the brains that control the tool. For example, in Russia it is not uncommon to go hunting with machine guns - inherited from Soviet Union, so what? |
| Posted by: Nesvarbukas 2007-02-24 16:24 |
| #4 More info at the Gun Talk site: Something fascinating just happened. I suspect it will be studied by those who do such things, but at this point, it is clear that last weekend we saw a sea change in the way gun owners react to threats. We can take away from this experience several observations. The first is that 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 when he says they never thought the government would take away their hunting guns. To gun banners, there is no such thing as a good gun. They want them all. When Tom Diaz, of the Violence Policy Center, was on Gun Talk, I forced him to admit that he would like to ban all guns. What about the police, I asked. Once we get all the other guns, he said, the police won't need their guns, either. 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. The next thing we learn from this is that the world has just changed. This entire episode took place inside of 36 hours, on a weekend -- a three-day weekend for President's Day. It happened...and this is important...entirely on the internet. The original posting was on the net, the reaction was on the net, the emails demanding that companies break off with Zumbo were on the net, and the reactions from the companies were all on their web sites. This was completely an internet event. It was a nuclear explosion, with tens of thousands of messages posted, spanning all the firearms-related web sites. |
| Posted by: Steve 2007-02-24 16:18 |
| #3 btw - excellent link Steve, thx |
| Posted by: Frank G 2007-02-24 16:14 |
| #2 the Brady campaign could hire him.... then again, they have little use for him, except for quoting him. Idiot forgot who his audience was. Now, he can still write..on some obscure unpaid blog |
| Posted by: Frank G 2007-02-24 16:07 |
| #1 There's a good summation here |
| Posted by: Steve 2007-02-24 15:45 |