Shooting his mouth off

Jim Zumbo, legendary scribe of the hunting set, was crucified by the NRA, and axed from his job at Outdoor Life, for declaring that assault weapons have no place in hunting. But don't call him a martyr.

By Steven Rinella

Read more: Guns, National Rifle Association, Life

March 17, 2007 | The past weeks have been great for dramatic reversals. Newt Gingrich admitted that he had, contrary to his own previous statements, been cheating on his wife at the same time that he led the congressional charge against Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinski scandal. A month before that, the nation was somewhat stunned, or at least amused, when the Rev. Ted Haggard proclaimed himself to be "completely heterosexual" after leaving the top post at his Colorado Springs mega-church following admissions that he'd engaged in a long-standing homosexual relationship with a male prostitute. Haggard downplayed the abruptness of his transformation by informing his parishioners that the three-week psychological intensive he underwent in Phoenix actually gave him "three years (sic) worth of analysis and treatment."

If Haggard's reversal causes a little eye rolling, consider that of Jim Zumbo, the recently crucified author of literally thousands of magazine articles and some 20 books on hunting and firearms. In a Feb. 16 blog entry titled "Assault Rifles for Hunters?" on the Web site of the venerable sporting magazine Outdoor Life, where he's been a full-time hunting editor for 30 years, Jim Zumbo expressed his concern about hunters who use AR and AK or "assault rifles" for legal hunting purposes. "Excuse me," he wrote, "maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no use place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I'll go so far as to call them 'terrorist' rifles ... I say game departments should ban them from the prairies and woods."

It's hard to overstate the gun-owning community's backlash over Zumbo's remarks. Armed with blogs of their own, firearms advocates labeled Zumbo a traitor and generated rapid-fire e-mail campaigns that poured thousands of complaints into the in boxes of Zumbo's associates and sponsors, ranging from High Mountain Jerky, a Wyoming mom-and-pop producer of specialty wild-game curing spices, to the firearms giant Remington Arms Co.

The gist of the complaints was that Zumbo, through his suggestion that certain weapons have no place in hunting, was forcing an internal division within the ranks of gun owners. Critics took aim at Zumbo's frequent use of the phrase "hunters and shooters," which delineates people who own guns for hunting purposes from people who own guns for myriad other reasons, such as skeet shooting, self-defense or predator control on agricultural lands. "We as gun owners have enough problems battling outright opponents to the Second Amendment," the e-mails went. "We don't need to start battling each other as well."

Six days after Zumbo's post, Remington CEO Tommy Milner essentially clicked "reply to all" to the complainants and issued a mass e-mail: "Remington is shocked and disappointed by the comments of Jim Zumbo which have been widely circulated on the web. These comments do not reflect either my own feelings or those of my company! Accordingly we are severing all business ties with Mr. Zumbob

Not surprisingly, the National Rifle Association, a steadfast supporter of Second Amendment rights for both hunters and non-hunters, announced that its organization's magazines, American Sportsman, American Hunter and American Guardian, would no longer purchase articles from Jim Zumbo. Like salt in Zumbo's wounds, even High Mountain Jerky announced that it was removing Zumbo's mug from its packaging.

As the ax fell on Zumbo's neck, editorials in newspapers across the country -- the New York Times, the Austin-American Statesman, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune -- declared him a victim of vitriolic right-wing gun lunatics. But Zumbo opted not to cash in on his newfound martyrdom. On the contrary. He declared that he was "dead wrong" in his blog. The day he wrote it, he explained, he'd been "beat up by 60 mph winds." He was "tired and exhausted," he pleaded. He "should have gone to bed early." Instead, he committed the "greatest blunder" of his long career.

This litany of apologies went on for days. He logged into the chat room on Ted Nugent's Web site and announced plans to purchase an assault rifle and to enroll in tactical training courses to learn how to use it. He and the Nuge, normally an avid bowhunter, confirmed plans to go on a hunting trip using AR-15s. Zumbo vowed to "seize this opportunity to educate hunters and shooters who shared my ignorance."

Having metastasized into a national news event, the Zumbo affair has been portrayed as a story about the rift between gun owners, or as Zumbo put it, between "hunters and shooters." As an avid hunter who gets the the bulk of his dietary protein through the use of firearms, I see the story quite differently. To me, the Zumbo controversy illuminates the perpetual misunderstanding on the part of the American public about the role of firearms in hunting, and I want to use it as an opportunity to clear up some of that confusion. While Zumbo's desperate about-face on assault rifles is sadly comic, many of his critics, despite their own reactionary ways, have a point. Assault rifles are not anathema to responsible hunting. In fact, the last nine or 10 decades' worth of wildlife conservation laws have rendered the assault weapon monster moot. But there remains one enemy to hunting that is far more malicious than any weapon, and that is a failure on everyone's part to protect wildlife and wildlife habitats.

First off, no one really knows how to define "assault weapon." At best, the designation is based on cosmetics. A major misunderstanding about hunting guns revolves around the use of "automatic." Automatic guns fall under two categories: fully automatic and semi-automatic. Fully automatic guns are otherwise known as machine guns. When the trigger is depressed, the weapon discharges a steady stream of bullets until the trigger is released or the gun runs out of ammo. It's very difficult to obtain a machine gun and you can't use them for hunting. In the state of New York, for instance, not only are fully automatic guns prohibited as hunting weapons, you can't hunt big game with a gun that holds more than six rounds of ammunition. Because of federal rules that apply to all states, it's illegal to hunt migratory waterfowl with a gun that is capable of holding more than three rounds.

Next page: It's not "assault" weapons that threaten hunting today