Conservative Blogger Loses Job Over Assault Rifle Crack

Not a headline I ever like to write, but this fellow brought it on himself:

"Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity," Zumbo wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life Web site. The Feb. 16 posting has since been taken down. "As hunters, we don't need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them. . . . I'll go so far as to call them 'terrorist' rifles."

As far as his sentiment goes, I'm a bit of a traditionalist myself but I will defend to the death your right to own cosmetically incorrect semi-automatic weapons. As a poor young feller I once invested in a second deer rifle, one for hunting in the brushy, briery Oklahoma woods that weren't very forgiving of my nice scoped bolt action. Like a lot of my fellow rednecks I went for a surplus Chicom SKS, which is cheap (and the ammo is cheap), fun to shoot, and about as powerful as a thirty-thirty. Never killed a deer with it, but I could have and I know many hunters who have. I also liked the irony of carrying as a sort of cold war trophy a weapon which was built and engineered for Mao's hordes to oppose capitalism.

Since those days my lot in life improved somewhat, and I once found myself shooting at Bisley with a bunch of well-bred young Englishmen. Life's funny that way. And I can say that I prefer blued steel and walnut to black fiberglass and parkerizing. But though I may have acquired a certain degree of gun snobbery, I ain't above my raising. If an AR or an SKS fit your hunting needs or your budget, it really is no skin off my nose. And if you don't violate See-Dub's number one gun safety rule ("don't hunt with idiots"), I'll still go hunting with you no matter what sort of equipment you use.

There are hunting practices I do disapprove of--"canned hunting", for example. I don't care if you've got a Rigby double rifle that was owned by Winston Churchill, if you pay them to drive a caged animal under your tree so you can kill it and call yourself a trophy hunter, then you're a cruel, classless, laughable schmuck. I'd rather hang out with a bunch of fellows in old pickups shooting beat-up Marlins or Mini-14s. The clothes you wear don't make you classy, and neither does the kind of gun you own.

As for the reaction to Mr. Zumbo's entry, well, I wish I could read the whole blog post, but it's been taken down. Zumbo had a long career as an outdoor writer and I hope he can recover from his error. I do understand the outrage. Democrats took both houses of Congress, Hillary might be back, and even two of the leading Republican presidential candidates are extraordinarily bad on this issue. The shooting community is justifiably nervous. It's one thing when liberals brand semiautomatics as "terrorist weapons". It's very alarming when hunters who ought to know better do so.