They eat their own...continued.

• Tipping Point -- Suicide on the Web
  

  Something fascinating just happened. I suspect it will be studied by those who do such things, but at this point, it is clear that last weekend we saw a sea change in the way gun owners react to threats.
  
  If you heard Gun Talk last Sunday, Feb. 18, you heard Jim Zumbo, longtime hunting writer for Outdoor Life, addressing a blog (online comment piece) he wrote. If you didn't hear it, you can download the archive file here: http://guntalk.libsyn.com. It's the February 18 show, "part C."
  
  Jim basically committed career suicide. In short, he wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life web site that he had just learned (while on a hunt) that some people use AR-15 rifles for hunting. He offered his thought that this was a bad image for hunters. Okay, that's his opinion. But, he went even further, calling for game departments to ban the use of these rifles for hunting. After crossing the line and calling for a banning of those guns for hunting, he firmly planted his foot on a land mine and called AR-15s "terrorist rifles." The explosion from that misstep was heard throughout the firearms industry.
  
  Having just read some of the comments on a few of the online groups where people were posting Zumbo's home address and personal information, calling for . . . well, it was hard to know what they were calling for . . . I made a comment about our willingness to eat our own. Some of that was based on hearing gunnies say that they won't buy Ruger firearms because of something Bill Ruger said two decades ago. Hey, the man is dead and buried.
  
  Still, in this case, I was wrong. That's not what was going on here, as I discovered when I got off the air. To listeners who took offense, I do apologize. 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."
  
  We can take away from this experience several observations.
  
  The first is that this attitude of "just let them take those ugly, black guns" is common among hunters and competitive shooters. Anyone with that attitude is a fool. Sit down with a hunter from England or Australia, hear him tell the story of what happened there, and watch the tears well up in his eyes when he says they never thought the government would take away their hunting guns. To gun banners, there is no such thing as a good gun. They want them all. When Tom Diaz, of the Violence Policy Center, was on Gun Talk, I forced him to admit that he would like to ban all guns. What about the police, I asked. Once we get all the other guns, he said, the police won't need their guns, either.
  
  A ban on black guns, or "Saturday Night Specials," or 50-caliber rifles, is a ban on all our guns. There is no such thing as a bad gun or a good gun. We can't throw babies off the back of the sled, thinking it will keep the wolves away from us.
  
  The next thing we learn from this is that the world has just changed. This entire episode took place inside of 36 hours, on a weekend -- a three-day weekend for President's Day. It happened...and this is important...entirely on the internet. The original posting was on the net, the reaction was on the net, the emails demanding that companies break off with Zumbo were on the net, and the reactions from the companies were all on their web sites. This was completely an internet event. It was a nuclear explosion, with tens of thousands of messages posted, spanning all the firearms-related web sites.



• Statement from Outdoor Life
  

  Due to the controversy surrounding Jim Zumbo's recent postings, 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.