By Pat Wray
For the Gazette-Times
Something very strange happened in the world of outdoor communication this week. One of America’s best known hunting writers slipped and metaphorically cut himself — so a few thousand of his closest friends ate him alive.
Jim Zumbo, who made a name for himself — and developed a large following — writing about big game hunting for the past 40 years, was on a Remington Arms-sponsored Wyoming coyote hunting trip. He learned during a conversation with one of his guides that a lot of people use military style rifles (M-16 and AK-47 knockoffs) to hunt prairie dogs and coyotes. This surprised Zumbo and he wrote about the situation in his Outdoor Life-sponsored blog. In his posting, Zumbo called the knockoffs “assault” and “terrorist” rifles. He also said their use was bad for the image of hunters and that “game departments should ban them from the prairies and woods.”
Within hours, gun owners from around the world were lathered up and sharpening their Internet knives. Remington Arms took the first cuts; they were swamped by messages from people who threatened to boycott Remington products because of their connection to Zumbo. Remington didn’t hesitate, pulling their sponsorship of Zumbo’s television show from the Outdoor Channel. Soon thereafter, other sponsors, including Mossy Oak and Cabela’s, had severed their relationships with him. These were not just symbolic departures ... these were outfits that regularly gave Zumbo money, lots of it, and now it’s gone. Even Outdoor Life, the venerable outdoor magazine for whom Zumbo has written for decades, fired him as their hunting editor.
In a few short days the career of the best known hunting writer in America was served in small bloody pieces to a crowd of vicious, vengeful, vitriolic jackals. This is worth analysis.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I don’t like Jim Zumbo. He likes me even less. We’ve had a couple professional disagreements over the years that have spilled over into our personal lives. Nonetheless, he has always been a staunch proponent of shooting and hunting, as well as an exceptionally capable communicator in several different genres.
Second, I don’t agree with his assessment of the military-style rifles, commonly referred to as “black” rifles. They are just semi-automatic rifles, like a hundred other makes and models; you have to pull the trigger each time you want to shoot one round. If people like the military design, I see no reason they can’t use them. And the calibers common in those rifles, while not ideal for big game hunting, are certainly effective enough for varmint hunting.
What’s interesting about this entire situation is how quickly it escalated into a feeding frenzy that destroyed a good man’s career. The easy answer is the Internet. We’ve seen examples before, blogs and e-mails developing into uncontrolled windstorms that destroy everything in their paths. The danger of such a thing happening is a fact of today’s world and no one, even the most mighty, is immune.
But we need to look beyond the Internet, into the genesis of the anger and fear that fueled the Internet attacks. If we look closely, we will find the National Rifle Association, or NRA. For decades the NRA has fostered a climate of fear and paranoia among gun owners. They have hammered home the message that everyone is out to take our guns and that compromise is tantamount to treason. They created an attitude within their membership that anyone who disagreed was an enemy and the best defense was a good offense. Nowhere has that message taken root as strongly as within the owners of the military style rifles, and it was they who came after Zumbo in their thousands.
It is ironic — and tragic — that the NRA’s message, so effectively delivered for so many years, has come back to ruin the professional life of one of their own. And it was done in a strange, alternative universe, in which the firing squad commands used for his execution were “READY ... FIRE ... AIM!”
Pat Wray can be reached at
[email protected].
