The Martialist: The Magazine For Those Who Fight Unfairly

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.

Someone once said that to err is human. I just erred,
and made
without question, the biggest blunder in my 42 years of writing hunting
articles…

…Let me explain the circumstances surrounding that blog. I was
hunting coyotes, and after the hunt was over and being beat up by 60
mph winds all day, I was discussing hunting with one of the young
guides. I was tired and exhausted, 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…

So you see, Zumbo’s your best friend if you support the Second
Amendment. He was tired. It wasn’t his fault. He took a a few of those
people he called “terrorists” — oh, excuse me, American soldiers — on
free hunts, so he must support the Second Amendment. Why, the man has a
flag that he flies all year ’round; how could you dare question his
patriotism?

At what point do ridiculous, backpedaling excuses like these start to
sound like an anti-Semite squealing that he’s not anti-Semitic, because
he’s got Jewish friends, or a Klan member protesting that he’s not
racist, because he goes out drinking with his black coworkers? Now,
Zumbo is not a racist (I could no more assert that than I could claim
he was a Martian, a Republican, or a dentist — I don’t know anything
about the man’s personal life or credentials other than what he wrote
in his blog). What I can say with certainty and
conviction, based on the same two blog post excerpted here, is that
Zumbo is a hunting snob who sneers at other gun owners whose guns don’t match his definition of a “sporting firearm.”

Zumbo is, in short, a Fudd.

The firestorm took its toll. Sponsor Remington severed all ties with
the man in no uncertain terms. Cabelas, another sponsor, issued a
statement saying that it was analyzing its contractual obligations —
the implication being, I think, that it was trying to determine if it
could legally drop support for Zumbo. Yet another sponsor, Hi Mountain
Jerky, sent e-mail saying explicitly that it did not support Mr.
Zumbo’s statements and that it “would not have supported [his hunting
show on the Outdoor Channel] or had his endorsement on our packaging in
the past had we known [his opinion].”

Outdoor Life Magazine finally deleted the Zumbo columns completely,
dropping them down the Memory Hole while bleating in protest that it
really wasn’t anti-gun, not really. “Due to the controversy surrounding
Jim Zumbo’s recent postings,” the official announcement read,
“Outdoor Life has decided to discontinue the ‘Hunting With Zumbo’ blog
for the time being. Outdoor Life has always been, and will always be, a
steadfast supporter of our Second Amendment rights, which do not make
distinctions based on the looks of the firearms we choose to own, shoot
and take hunting.”

Outdoor Life’s protestations notwithstanding, various friends of Zumbo
were quick to leap to his defense, activating the Good Ol’ Boy network
of Fudds and other less than solidly Second Amendment-supporting
hunters (and those others who are nominally shooters, but hardly
defenders of the Second Amendment) who were only too willing to act as
apologists for one of their own. It didn’t matter that Zumbo’s strident
and self-righteous editorial was made from ignorance by his
own admission in his “apology.” No, all that mattered was
another flannel-clad man with a wood-stocked rifle was being taken to
task for his ignorance by owners of, and sympathizers to, the
“terrorist rifles” Zumbo had so bravely decried. It was therefore
necessary to start bitching and whining about how terribly unfair it
was that Zumbo be held accountable for his statements.

Jim Shepherd of the Outdoor Wire commented on the controversy, saying
in part that the Zumboing of Zumbo was the “shouting down” of “voices
calling for reason and tolerance.” This characterization does not
emphasize harshly enough the fact that it is Zumbo who is responsible
for creating, through his inflammatory and ignorant rhetoric, what
Shepherd characterized as a “schism” — the “ill-considered” creation
of “good-gun, bad-gun categories” even now being used in Congress as
“further evidence of the ‘need’ to regulate firearms — all firearms —
more stringently.”

I wonder if readers will get the impression from Shepherd’s column (The
Blog Heard ‘Round The Industry: Jim Zumbo angers firearm enthusiasts,
posted 20 February, 2007) that the “schism” is created by the implied
‘intolerance’ of those “firearms enthusiasts” angrily calling for
Zumbo’s metaphorical head on a virtual platter. If only those of us
eager to protect the Second Amendment would be more ‘reasonable,’ one
might conclude, there would be no “schism” and the gun-grabbers
wouldn’t be using our own divisive politics against us. The problem
with this tempting conclusion is that it relieves of responsibility for
his actions the man who created the problem, who
indeed sought to create “good-gun, bad-gun” categories — Zumbo
himself, whose mind-numbing ignorance in writing the editorial in the
first place is matched only by the insincerity of his subsequent
apology for it.

“Gun Talk” host Tom Gresham, in a column titled “Tipping Point —
Suicide on the Web,” concluded that Jim Zumbo “basically committed
career suicide.” He went on to explain that Zumbo “made a mistake from
which there was no recovery. He wrote his blog while on a hunting trip.
Just before going on the air, I checked the internet forums (fora?) and
found a firestorm. People were livid, and with good reason. Some of the
comments were clearly over the top, but most of them conveyed the rage
that comes from a feeling of being betrayed by someone you thought of
as one of your own.”

Gresham, it seems, now regrets initial comments he made in an interview
with Zumbo about the online controversy, comments in which he decried
firearms owners’ “willingness to eat our own.” He was wrong to say
that, Gresham now says, because such cannibal mistreatment of Zumbo was
“not what was going on here, as I discovered when I got off the
air…The outrage by gun owners is completely understandable. To put it
in context, Zumbo’s comments came only days after we saw the
introduction of a bill in Congress to bring back the Clinton Gun Ban
(the so-called ‘assault weapons’ ban). The final nail in the coffin was
when– Sunday afternoon — the Brady Campaign (the leading group
working to restrict gun rights) posted Zumbo’s comments to several
places on the net, saying, in effect, ‘See, even the top hunting writer
says these rifles have no legitimate use.’ At that point, it was all
over for Jim Zumbo.”

Gresham correctly points out that the real problem here is not Zumbo’s
statements in and of themselves, ignorant as they were. No, the problem
is that Zumbo’s comments were almost immediately picked up by various
anti-gun groups as evidence of support for their noble cause within
the firearms community. Such gun-banning groups are always
trolling for pet “experts,” those Second Amendment quislings supposedly
knowledgable of firearms whom they can trot out for media soundbites
condemning certain kinds of “bad” firearms. This is a common tactic in
the incremental push among such groups for total gun bans. First they
go after “junk guns” and “Saturday Night Specials.” Then they attack
“assault weapons.” Then they decry the proliferation of “sniper
rifles.” It doesn’t matter that in all cases, these vilifying terms are
lies and distortions meant to justify banning perfectly legitimate
firearms. All that matters is that the gun banners can claim a victory
and further their agendas. If they can do so while pimping a “firearms
expert” who’s happy to oblige them with fuel for their propaganda
machine, they’ll do so. It confers on them the veneer of legitimacy
while disguising their true intentions, cloaking as “reasonable gun
control measures” their long-term goal of banning all firearms.

The problem is, you see, that gun owners are a persecuted minority. The
Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, which protects the
inalienable and natural right of American citizens to keep and bear
arms, has been under attack for years, incrementally chipped away,
suppressed, infringed, and circumvented by activist judges and
left-wing pressure groups almost since its inception. Some of the
earliest infringements on the RKBA had to do with restrictions on bowie
knives, Arkansas toothpicks, and other tools of dueling, a tradition
seen as barbaric by more “civilized” governing Americans. Some time
later, “Jim Crow” laws included restrictions on firearms ownership,
such as requiring permits issued by local law enforcement, in an
attempt to disarm black Americans. The 1930s and the 1960s saw
restrictions on firearms that were politically motivated by attempts
(ill-conceived and ineffective attempts, I might add) to prevent gun
violence, born of national horror at crime and political
assassinations.

This issue is so serious because it quite literally concerns life and
death — specifically, the lives and deaths of American citizens trying
to protect their families and themselves from crime. Any attack on your
firearms rights reduces or eliminates by force of law your right, your
opportunity, and your ability to own and employ a firearm, the most
useful tool for personal defense yet invented. Any statements that
facilitate these attacks — any lies, arguments, or quotes used by the
firearms prohibitionists to attack your gun rights — are therefore no
less than an indirect attempt to decrease the value of your life. A man
who presumes to tell you that you cannot own a firearm is not just
pissing on the United States Constitution and the Second Amendment; he
is presuming to tell you how much your life is worth. He is saying he
sees no reason to make it easier for you to defend that life, or the
lives of your family. He is declaring his supremacy over you by
presuming to judge your life and its value. If there is a more
tyrannical worldview, I don’t know what it might be.

Whenever your firearms rights are attacked, therefore, you have no
choice but to see that attack, ideologically, as an attempt to devalue
your life. You are fully within your rights to speak out, loudly and
persistently, in opposition to such presumption. You are also correct
to be outraged that anyone would presume to tell you what your life is
worth. There are varying degrees of outrage, however.

When irrational, fearful, ignorant people like the gun-banners at the
Brady Campaign or the Violence Policy Institute or (whatever it’s
called) spit on your life and the lives of your family, empowering
violent criminals by attempting to disarm you, it’s not much of a
surprise. Some people simply have this worldview and, motivated by a
fear of guns and an ignorance of firearms technology, they lash out in
all their impotent fury, a screaming mob made powerful by pandering
lawmakers with no respect for the United States Constitution. Gun
owners have pretty much come to expect this behavior. Those gun owners
alive and active today have been coping with truly serious and
deleterious infringements on their gun rights since the 1960s.

When an irrational furtherance of firearms prohibition is made from
within the ranks of your fellow shooters, however, it is
only just and it is perfectly understandable that one’s outrage would
be that much greater. That is what occurred. Jim Zumbo attacked the
firearms rights of the very people with whom he hunts and socializes,
the Fudds within their numbers notwithstanding. He betrayed the people
he should have been working to support, the people whose rights are
protected by the very Constitution one would hope
Zumbo is lauding when he flies his precious flag 365 days a year. I
would think such a patriotic American would understand why you can’t
then call for the banning of certain kinds of
firearms without infuriating thousands of Second Amendment supporters
and armed citizens, who see such statements as a betrayal of their
rights and an attack on the values of their lives. But, no, Zumbo and
his Fudd supporters don’t grasp this. Instead they mewl and shriek that
the First Amendment protects their right to further the destruction of
the Second without consequence.

The First Amendment guarantees you the right to speak your mind without
fear of legal repercussion. It is not, however, a shield behind which
to hide in an attempt to avoid the unpopularity incurred when one
voices unpopular opinions. It is not an all-purpose aegis from whose
shelter you may demand license to offend anyone, anywhere, for any
reason, unless you are willing to live with the consequences of having
given offense. This is why having the courage of one’s convictions requires
courage. Stand up and say what is unpopular, by all means —
but don’t then complain that you have become unpopular.
In a free market, you are free to piss on your customers — but don’t
complain when they take their business elsewhere.

Zumbo and the Fudds don’t, won’t, or can’t understand that the Second
Amendment is not about hunting, no matter how many times this is
repeated vehemently by RKBA supporters. When Zumbo’s hunting rifles are
banned as “sniper rifles” (a tactic even now being employed by the gun
banners to mischracterize any rifle with some glass mounted to it),
perhaps he’ll come to regret his comments — but then again, he’s
already admitted to advocating the banning of firearms about which he
is, in his own words and by his own admission, “totally ignorant.”
Ignorance is a tool of the firearms prohibitionists, the gun banners,
the gun-grabbers, the antis. By any name, they are fighting to destroy
the United States Constitution and the rights of all American citizens
as protected by the Second Amendment. When the Fudds employ these
tactics, they are every bit as guilty as the Brady Campaign and their
ilk.