Posted on 02/23/2007 12:53:38 PM PST by holymoly
Poor Jim Zumbo. I honestly feel sorry for him. He doesn't deserve the beating that he's been getting. Certainly not this bad of a beating. Not for just 255 written words on the Internet.
Zumbo is the hunting editor for Outdoor Life magazine and a resident of the Cody, Wyo., country. He has been at the center of a firestorm in recent days that has burned him personally and professionally.
It all began with a post on the "Hunting With Zumbo" blog on the Outdoor Life Web site last Friday.
In his post, Zumbo said he was coyote hunting in southeastern Wyoming testing a cartridge with a couple of Remington Arms Co. representatives when his guide told him that AR and AK military-style rifles were becoming popular hunting weapons.
That surprised Zumbo. In all his life, he had only ever seen one of them used.
Post goes south
That's when things went sour with the post - real sour. Under the heading of "Assault Rifles For Hunters?" he went on to describe these rifles as "terrorist" rifles that have no place in hunting.
Zumbo wrote, "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.'"
Zumbo continued, "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 (sic) and woods."
That's how the post ended.
Lighting up the Internet
From there, the blog and the issue pretty much took on a life of its own.
Before Outdoor Life shut Zumbo's blog down on Monday, there were more than 3,000 comments posted. Other blogs on other Web sites also began to light up across cyberspace.
Gun rights advocates blistered Zumbo. Anti-gun advocates latched onto Zumbo's words saying that even an influential hunter was calling to ban more guns. And, in the process, they vented their wrath on anyone and everyone associated with Zumbo.
Outdoor Life made a statement about how the magazine is a "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."
Remington Arms severed all sponsorship ties with Zumbo effective immediately.
Mossy Oak, a camo clothing manufacturer, severed all sponsorship ties with Zumbo effective immediately.
Zumbo's TV show on the Outdoor Channel didn't appear at its scheduled time this week.
And the latest word is that Cabela's, another Zumbo sponsor, is reviewing matters before it makes a decision on continuing its sponsorship.
Will more follow? Who knows? Think of it as a feeding frenzy among the big sharks of the outdoor world.
Zumbo apologized quickly for his choice of words and his call for the gun ban, both on national radio and on his blog before Outdoor Life shut the blog down "for the time being." Zumbo's blog post was headlined, "I was wrong, BIG TIME."
Bankrupt brand
Yet, as Jim Shepherd of the Internet-based The Shooting Wire, noted, "Zumbo has gone from bankable brand name to leper status in record time."
That's really sad.
As I wrote to an outdoor writer friend of mine as this was blowing up, "You know, that could have been me. I could have written much the same as Zumbo did. I wouldn't have worded it that way. I wouldn't have called for a ban on those guns. But I know exactly what Jim was getting at in what he wrote."
For one thing, Zumbo writes from the standpoint of being a lifelong hunter - not necessarily a target shooter. There are differences between hunting and both competitive target shooting or simply target shooting for fun.
Choosing the ideal hunting rifle is far, far different from choosing the ideal target rifle. You look for different things.
You don't carry many heavy barreled target rifles up mountain slopes - not more than once, anyway. Very few big game rifles in the West are semi-automatics - most are bolt-actions which are considered more accurate. I don't like light rifles because they're too hard to hold steady, or heavy magnum calibers because they kick too much. I do like 3x9 variable scopes.
In hunting, everyone has preferences that are all built on picking the best rifle for the task and the conditions they expect to encounter.
That being said, in Montana, one of the quirks of our big game hunting regulations is that we have no rifle caliber or bullet restrictions for taking big game animals, except for bison.
You can legally hunt elk or moose with a .22 rimfire short, long or long rifle cartridge. You can hunt bighorn sheep or mountain goats with a tiny .17-caliber. Or, as in the case of a friend of mine last fall, he could legally hunt his antelope with a .50 caliber rifle.
Why anyone would want to take a big game animal as small and thin-skinned as an antelope with a humongously powerful .50-caliber - other than to simply say he did it - is a mystery to me. So I teased him about it all fall long. And I asked him what he was going to do if he took on a full-blown deer? Perhaps he ought to move up to a Howitzer if he could find a stock to fit it - I think that's legal, too.
My guess is that many of the serious gun advocates who are blistering Zumbo now would have a hard time being advocates of using a .22 short for moose. They'd wonder about that Howitzer for deer, too.
Undeserved
I've known Jim Zumbo for years. He's not anti-gun. He's not anti-hunting. He does believe in using the best and most efficient rifle, caliber and bullet to make a clean, one-shot kill. If people are doing that with ARs and AKs, that's fine, but I'll admit that it's a surprise to me, too. Those wouldn't be my first choices for hunting rifles either.
Granted, Zumbo's choice of words was inflammatory. He didn't spell out what he meant as well as he could have either, in terms of hunting guns and shooting guns for the range. And to talk of a hunting ban was stupid. Instead, he should have simply said there are far better rifle choices out there to accomplish hunting tasks.
But to wash away all the good things he has done in support of guns and hunting over the years because of one 255-word blog post? To make him the Second Amendment whipping boy for both sides of the issue? To treat him as Shepherd's so-called leper of the shooting world?
No, that's not deserved at all - not like this. And for that, I truly feel sorry for him.
I had to check it out and you're right. Those people are loons.
Watched his show the other night on the Outdoor Channel. This POS was hunting Springbok using a silencer on his rifle.
Another do as I say, not do as I do liberal!
T%he 2A isn't about hunting Mr Dumbo.
Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
He deserves the derision he's receiving, IMO.
"As I wrote to an outdoor writer friend of mine as this was blowing up, "You know, that could have been me. I could have written much the same as Zumbo did. I wouldn't have worded it that way. I wouldn't have called for a ban on those guns. But I know exactly what Jim was getting at in what he wrote.""
Uh oh, ANOTHER writer who thinks RKBA is about hunting or target shooting.
I'm not familiar with the name; is he an "outdoor sports writer" or a hunting writer?
If he writes representing shooters he will get Zumboed too!
Yeah, my blood pressure spiked!
Just a Hunter summed it up succinctly:
"He probably did more harm with those 255 words than the anti-gun lobby could with 255,000. Folks they want all of our guns, not some of them. Thinking that giving them the so-called assault weapons won't satisfy them, I guarantee it."
I really enjoy my Outdoor Life and Field and Stream subscriptions, and don't recall this controversy.
Undeserved
Red herring imo. Zumbo wasn't out deer hunting, he wasn't moose hunting. He was Coyote hunting if I remember correctly. The .223 round is just about perfect for Coyote, and the .223 is what is fired from a AR-15, the same round fired from a Ruger Mini-14 ranch which I'm sure he didn't think of as a "terrorist" weapon.
Zumbo's post wasn't about caliber, it was about the gun. Zumbo should know (and probably did know) the caliber of round that an AR-15 fires. That wasn't his problem. His problem was the gun itself. Zumbo's post showed that even estimed elite hunters don't understand that the 2nd does not apply to hunting.
The storm he created was much desearved imo. Hopefully it woke up a lot of people though so something good can come of it.
I got a lot of crap when I went deer hunting with an AK a few years ago. I had the 5rnd mag. I was the only one in the group to get a buck or a deer for that matter that year. Nice clean 125yard shot through heavy brush. Another time I was tracking one that another hunter had wounded. Again, the AK came through and I cleaned things up for him.
Hope all this unites us and gets the blood flowing again. We have a unfriendly congress and we need to be on guard. I am glad to hear more people are using AR-15 rifles, would like to get one too someday.
To be a professional writer and a life-long user of fire arms and not expect such a response is foolish.
The 2nd amendment is no more about protecting hunting than the first is about protecting poetry.
Zumbo? Or the author of this article?
Zumbo was the "Hunting Editor" for Outdoor Life (among other things).
The author of this article is the "outdoor editor of The Billings Gazette".
Zumbo forgot that assault (semi auto) rifles are not the choice of terrorists. Plane, cars, and people that explode are.
Your facts and analysis are 100% correct. I am in complete agreement. Zumbo deserves every stroke of the lash and his arrogance and ignorant betrayal of the 2A should not be forgotten.
It's not about sport.
He didn't spell out what he meant as well as he could have
He spelled it out quite clearly, phrased repeatedly in different ways from different angles.
His repeated apologies completely neglected to undo what he spelled out quite clearly and phrased repeatedly in different ways from different angles.
He called us terrorists - because of what we choose to use for sporting and non-sporting purposes.
That he has of late discovered use of such things for sporting purposes does not detract that he still has not retracted calling us terrorists for what we use for non-sporting purposes.
He has not acknowledge that there is legitimate non-sporting use, and that there are legitimate tools suited therefor.
What d'ya hunt with the belt fed .308? [Or isn't there a season yet?]
Thats ok.
Either Rudy or Hillary is gonna take away all those scary looking guns.
Second Amendment is not about hunting.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.