Front Sight, Press

Assault Rifles For Hunters?

As I write this, I’m hunting coyotes in southeastern Wyoming with Eddie Stevenson, PR Manager for Remington Arms, Greg Dennison, who is senior research engineer for Remington, and several writers. We’re testing Remington’s brand new .17 cal Spitfire bullet on coyotes.

I must be living in a vacuum. The guides on our hunt tell me that the use of AR and AK rifles have a rapidly growing following among hunters, especially prairie dog hunters. I had no clue. Only once in my life have I ever seen anyone using one of these firearms.

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.  Jim Zumbo, Outdoor Life Blog

This is one of the dumbest things I’ve seen in a long time. The sh*tstorm he stirred up in the blogosphere is truly amazing, not unjustified, but remarkable in its ferocity. The CEO of Remington is already out, on a Sunday, announcing that Zumbo is toast. Makes you wonder if Zumbo has been living in a cave or something. And it was so unnecessary. Even if he personally doesn’t like “black rifles” how could he not know that calling their owners “terrorists” would be professional suicide? It’s one of those incomprehensible exercises in self-destruction usually reserved for Democratic presidential candidates.

There’s not a lot that I can add to this sad episode that hasn’t been said better and more vehemently by other bloggers. If you want to read their commentary, here are some links: Blogonomicon, View from the Porch,  Ninth Stage,  The Smallest Minority,  A Keyboard and a .45, PawPaw’s House, Xavier, The War on Guns and probably a thousand others.

Zumbo called for a ban on AR and AK type rifles and called their users terrorists. There’s really not much coming back from that. Thousands upon thousands of internet savvy gun users went up in arms and screamed for his head. His sponsors — Remington, Mossy Oak, Gerber, Outdoor Life, The NRA and others — immediately tossed him into the ash can.

This really speaks to me of the way the Internet changes things. Honestly, I had never heard of Zumbo before. I’m not much of hunter. I think I read a copy of Outdoor Life several years ago while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. It’s not a publication I read regularly. There are quite a few gun writers who I have read regularly for many years, but I can’t recall ever reading anything memorable by Zumbo. But he posts this unfortunate article on a blog and he’s suddenly the hottest issue in gun rights. Even the Brady Campaign picked up his screed. There are so many negative comments on the blog page that it took nearly a minute for my browser to load it, and I have 4 megabit broadband. That’s a lot of comments. In the old days, you really had to work at letting the world know how stupid you are. Now, thanks to Internet, you can let the whole universe know in about fifteen seconds. Zumbo is an old guy and probably had no idea how far his words would travel.

Just think how effective we could be if we focused this level of internet energy on issues like defeating bad legislation and gun-grabbing politicians. Carolyn McCarthy has already reintroduced the Assault Weapons Ban as H.R. 1022. Let’s channel some of this rage in that direction where it will count for something.

Perhaps, this is a cautionary tale for all of us bloggers: when you’re sitting there in an alcoholic haze, be careful what you blog. The ox you gore may be your own.

A day later…

Motivations fascinate me. I’m always trying to figure out why people do what they do, even though it’s often an impossible task. In this case, why did Zumbo gratuitously pick a fight with a large segment of the gun owning public? I bet he’s wishing he would have cleaned a gun or something instead of turning on his computer Saturday and writing his little blast against black rifle fans. That little string of words cost him a lot — lucrative sponsorships that I would give my eye teeth to get. The only thing I can come to in terms of an explanation is that he just didn’t know. He wasn’t aware of the issues and the kind of response his screed would trigger. I doubt that he would have posted that piece if he had any inkling of the consequences for him. How could this be?

I believe that some of it is generational. Had I come home with an AR or AK when my father was living, I am sure that the first question would be, “What in the hell do you need that thing for? Did you join the Army?” My dad was a life-long hunter, a police officer for a while, and carried a pistol for personal protection later in life. He was very pro-gun. He was a WWII vet and the last thing he wanted to fool with was a military rifle. He’d done his time with those and they held no fascination for him. Zumbo may be a bit younger than my dad, but he’s closer to that generation than to mine. I can tell you that those guys love their deer rifles and bird guns, and if they have a handgun it’s often a revolver, but the military stuff just doesn’t compute with them. I will also say that for these guys, to see someone take in after a whitetail or a bighorn sheep with an AK or an AR is distasteful to them. There’s just something wrong about that for them. It doesn’t mean they want to repeal the Second Amendment; it’s just a matter of style and aesthetics.

But Zumbo wasn’t just a regular Bubba stocking his freezer with venison; he was a gun writer for a major magazine, and it remains incomprehensible to me how he could have lived in this country for the last three-quarters of a century and not be tuned into the gun rights struggle we have been fighting. Two possibilities exist at this juncture: (1) that he is so deeply embedded in the sportsman hunter thing that he really didn’t know, or (2) he is tired of working and wanted to pick a fight. While I don’t know for a certainty, I lean toward the first option, that he really had no idea of the trouble he was about to make for himself.

What this suggests to me is that there is a large segment of the gun owning public that we aren’t reaching. When they hear “gun control” they think Glocks in the ghetto. They don’t make the connection that Teddy Kennedy is pounding the podium in the Senate trying to ban the ammunition for their deer rifles. We have some work to do. This isn’t meant to excuse Zumbo for the things he said. I think they were desperately wrong and showed a level of ignorance that cannot be excused in a professional gun writer. I’m sorry that this is going to cost him dearly, but he should have been more careful and thought more deeply about the issue. There are a lot of Zumbos out there. Our job is to understand them and educate them rather that simply destroying them when they voice their opinion. As Uncle said, “We are quick to devour our own.”