Date: Feb 22, 2007 10:15 PM
http://www.themartialist.com/0207/zumbo.htm
Calling All Fudds: The Zumboing of Zumbo and the RKBA
themartialist.com
Feb 2007
Phil Elmore

Anyone at all aware of the discussions among the online gun culture on the Internet
had little choice in mid-February, 2007, but to be aware, however dimly, of the
controversy surrounding Jim Zumbo. The amusingly named Zumbo, a “sportsman”
and hunting writer of some years’ experience, wrote a column in his “blog”
at Outdoor Life Magazine’s website in which he characterized those rifles inaccurately
termed semi-automatic “assault rifles” (so named for their magazine capacities
and cosmetic similarities to select-fire military rifles) as the tools of terrorists,
“terrifying” weapons for which he sees no use and which he would like
to shun, Amish-style, not to mention ban by force of law. In making these comments,
Zumbo draws a line between wholesome hunters like himself, and owners of guns that,
quite frankly, scare him. How any hunter conversant in firearms can be ‘terrified’
of weapons whose cartridges are far less powerful than the hunting rifles — excuse
me, “sporting firearms” Zumbo himself carries in the woods when he’s
shooting animals defies reason, but then, I’ll let him tell you in his own words:

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.

The gun culture online turned apoplectic when word spread of Zumbo’s ill-considered
editorial. Angry calls and e-mails began flooding in to Zumbo’s various sponsors,
including Remington, Gerber Legendary Blades, Cabelas, and the host of the blog
itself, Outdoor Life Magazine. Most demanded that Zumbo immediately be dropped by
sponsors, threatening a boycott — which, among gun owners, is no small thing. Second
Amendment zealots (of which I am proudly one) have long memories and they hold grudges.
The firearms community nationwide, while large, is relatively small. A gun company,
or any commercial endeavor related even indirectly to firearms, cannot survive if
it gets a reputation for less than solid support of the Second Amendment. A few
of the larger companies have weathered storms created by ill-considered business
decisions or public comments on the Second Amendment, but they are the exceptions
that prove the rule. The fact is that the threat of a boycott from supporters of
the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (RKBA) is no empty threat.

Fearing the ramifications of this, and perhaps pressured by Outdoor Life (if not
simply afraid of the impact such widespread outrage would have on his commercial
sponsors), Zumbo went back to his keyboard. With a sincerity matched only by former
President Bill Clinton’s lower-lip-chewing, finger-wagging denials “of
sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,” he typed the following “apology,”
in which he even invoked one of Bill Clinton’s more famous excuses for ramming
his own foot down his digestive tract — that of being “tired.” I’m
not sure how a lack of sleep turns you into an ignorantly pontificating traitor
to the United States Constitution, exactly, but the description is certainly applicable
in both cases:

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.

A Fudd is an ignorant hunter who sees no connection between his “sporting firearms”
– his hunting tools — and his firearms rights. He is not a Second Amendment supporter;
he may even be a Democrat. He loves to hunt, for whatever reason, but he has no
respect and no use for “non-traditional” shooters. He can’t imagine
a rifle stock made of plastic being good for anything; he can’t see a need or
a “legitimate sporting purpose” for any weapon cosmetically similar to
a military arm. He is, in short, an elitist who doesn’t wish to associate with
those gun owners he considers beneath him.

As the outrage over Zumbo’s column spread, consequences started to be felt.
The overwhelming grassroots pressure prompted posters in at least one Internet forum
to declare “Zumbo” a verb, a good working definition of which might be
“to inundate with grassroots support or opposition, as in the advocacy of a
political issue.” For my own part, I e-mailed all the sponsors I could think
of, including Zumbo himself. I e-mailed Outdoor Life demanding he be let go. I even
sent a snailmail letter with my business card to Jim Zumbo’s Post Office box,
because if I’m going to demand a man be fired, I’m damned well not going
to do it anonymously.

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.

You Fudds have a choice. You can understand that by furthering the cause of the
gun-grabbers, you are cutting your own throats. You can make the connection between
your precious hunting trips and the firearms you take on them. Or you can continue
to shoot your deer and your bears and whatever else, all the while working to make
certain that, eventually, you’ll no more be able to gun down an elk than you’ll
be able to shoot the rapist who is coming for your wife.

It’s your choice. Make it now

The Second Amendment IS Homeland Security !