The Jim Zumbo Controversy
Mentioning gun control of any kind will no doubt spark a debate among sportsmen. And if you’re well enough known in the sporting world, it may even be the first nail in your professional coffin. Jim Zumbo, a hunter and outdoor writer for Outdoor Life magazine, found this out the hard way after making a blog post about the use of AK and AR weapons by hunters.
After the flurry of controversy, Outdoor Life has pulled the plug on Zumbo’s blog, but here is what he said.
Assault Rifles For Hunters?
As I write this, I’m hunting coyotes in southeastern Wyoming with Eddie Stevenson, PR Manager for Remington Arms, Greg Dennison, who is senior research engineer for Remington, and several writers. We’re testing Remington’s brand new .17 cal Spitfire bullet on coyotes.
I must be living in a vacuum. The guides on our hunt tell me that the use of AR and AK rifles have a rapidly growing following among hunters, especially prairie dog hunters. I had no clue. Only once in my life have I ever seen anyone using one of these firearms.
I call them “assault” rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I’ll go so far as to call them “terrorist” rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are “tackdrivers.”
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.”
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 and woods.
Zumbo made the mistake of posting before thinking, and making some broad generalizations without being properly educated on the weapons he was boycotting. He came back with a lengthy apology, which is also gone now with the blog being closed down. Many other sites have portions of it posted, but I haven’t seen one posting it in it’s entirety, so I am doing so below.
I was wrong, BIG TIME
Someone once said that to err is human. I just erred, and made without question, the biggest blunder in my 42 years of writing hunting articles.
My blog inflamed legions of people I love most….. hunters and shooters. Obviously, when I wrote that blog, I activated my mouth before engaging my brain.
Let me explain the circumstances surrounding that blog. I was hunting coyotes, and after the hunt was over and being beat up by 60 mph winds all day, I was discussing hunting with one of the young guides. I was tired and exhausted, and I should have gone to bed early. When the guide told me that there was a “huge” following of hunters who use AR 15’s and similar weapons to hunt prairies dogs, I was amazed. At that point I wrote the blog, and never thought it through.
Now then, you might not believe what I have to say, but I hope you do. How is it that Zumbo, who has been hunting for more than 50 years, is totally ignorant about these types of guns. I don’t know. I shot one once at a target last year, and thought it was cool, but I never considered using one for hunting. I had absolutely no idea how vast the numbers of folks are who use them.
I never intended to be devisive, and I certainly believe in United we Stand, Divided we Fall. I’ve been an NRA member for 40 years, have attended 8 national NRA conventions in the last 10 years, and I’m an advisory board member for the United States Sportsmen’s Alliance which actively fights anti-hunters and animal rights groups for hunter’s rights.
What really bothers me are some of the unpatriotic comments leveled at me. I fly the flag 365 days a year in my front yard. Last year, through an essay contest, I hosted a soldier wounded in Iraq to a free hunt in Botswana. This year, through another essay contest, I’m taking two more soldiers on a free moose and elk hunt.
When I started blogging, I was told to write my thoughts, expressing my own opinion. The offensive blog I wrote was MY opinion, and no one else’s. None of the companies that I deal with share that opinion, nor were they aware of what I had written until this firestorm started.
Believe it or not, I’m your best friend if you’re a hunter or shooter, though it might not seem that way. I simply screwed up. And, to show that I’m sincere about this, I just talked to Ted Nugent, who everyone knows, and is a Board member of the NRA. Ted is extremely active with charities concerning our wounded military, and though he’s known as a bowhunter, Ted has no problem with AR 15’s and similar firearms. My sincerity stems from the fact that Ted and I are planning a hunt using AR 15’s. I intend to learn all I can about them, and again, I’m sorry for inserting my foot in my mouth.
Jim Zumbo
Everyone makes mistakes, and Jim Zumbo is no different. Yes, the damage has been done by his reckless comments, but I do believe him to be sincere in his apology. Instead of looking at the man’s overall record of what he has done for sportsmen, one miscalculated blog post is being targeted and very well could be the end of his professional career in a field that he loves. Does being well known mean that mistakes are less tolerable than if they’re made by a semi-nobody like myself or many other sportsmen out there?
Outdoor Life has, at least temporarily, severed their ties with him and Remington (the firearm company that sponsors him) has appeared to do the same. I would hope that if I was ever to make such a mistake that I would get a chance to redeem myself. I hope that Zumbo gets such a chance. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how the rest of this firestorm plays out.
hunting, Jim Zumbo, Outdoor Life, assualt rifles, gun control, controversy, news
February 20th, 2007 at 10:02 am
[…] If you missed the comments Zumbo made about AR and AK weapons and his apology, Hunting Sense has both of his complete posts. […]
February 23rd, 2007 at 10:54 am
So now that this dustup is settling, we ask for dark underlying motivations. What if this wasn’t just a brainfart on Zumbo’s part ? Two alternatives come to my mind:
1. he was trying to provoke exactly the response he got. Good man. Why would he want to do that ? What purpose is served by producing evidence of how the shooting public feels about our right to bear whatever arms we choose ? This leads to:
2. the rich comfortable mainstream of the US shooting community (I’m thinking of fellas with $2000 trap guns, you can think of the Lexus-and-canned-hunts crowd) including their representatives within the NRA leadership are having incontinence problems at the prospect of a double-barreled Democratic Congress running amuck and the three witches Feinstein Pelosi and Clinton coming in the night to squeeze their balls while plundering their gun safes.
Well, don’t worry, men, we’ll protect you. You may be the same kind of spineless riffraff that’s facilitated oppression throughout human history, but you should have the same freedom to exercise your unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness at more than 2500 fps that we do. I hear drycleaning is best for soiled worsted wool, and urine comes out of Italian leather if you dry it quickly, in case you need advice in that area.
I note that said double-barreled Dem Congress has just emitted its first, easy-to-anticipate yelp in this year’s round of the Great Attempt to Ban Satanic Assault Weapons, HR1022 sponsored by that poor creature Carolyn McCarthy. While the text is not available yet, we do ask ourselves whether the “leadership” of the US shooting community is mustering their usual fortitude and weighing the costs and benefits of reaching some accomodation with the gun banners which let them keep their Sunday toys and get rid of those crazies with milspec weapons who make them kind of nervous anyway. They talk about guns being for overthrowing the established order, but since the leadership is firmly entrenched in the established order, does that mean them, too ? Woo hoo, hold on there we might have to rethink this.
Was the Zumbo post a float of a position of retrenchment to the redoubt in the face of fearsome Democratic aggression ? We can’t do any better…
It seems like the mainstream gun culture is greatly concerned with its ability to get it up, as evinced by the number of ads for erectile dysfunction curatives in its publications. Maybe if they were less worried about getting it up and more concerned with identifying a course of appropriate, and principled, action, designed first not to maintain membership headcount and revenue but to protect the firearms-related interests of all US citizens, they might be more effective in dealing with the antigun forces. We’ll be waiting for you to join us if you get to that point, fellas.
February 23rd, 2007 at 11:26 am
I believe that he has a right to his opinion, but with him being as visible as he is any negative comment regardless or how it is intended does great damage and gives ammunition to the against crowd. He seems to have forgotten how many people have used the military type of rifle to begin their hunting career.
February 24th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Donald,
Great post, and I laughed my ass off at the bit about ‘…it’s ability to get it up’.
Cliff
February 24th, 2007 at 8:34 am
Gary,
Yes, he did seem to forget a lot of things when he made his post. No arguing that. The thing is, each person that has commented and voiced their opinion online about Zumbo and his goof-up is as visible as he is. As much attention as this has garnered, those same people that would use Zumbo’s words against us will be scouring the posts of us everyday people looking for more ammunition for the arsenal.
Cliff
February 26th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Jim Was Rright the FIRST time - assault rifles ARE a terrorist’s weapon. I mean get real, obviously only whimpy hunters who are afraid to miss would use one.
February 26th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
The gun-ban people are trying to give you the impression of maniacs running around the woods with machine guns spraying the whole area with bullets. That is not the case.
The AR-15 in question would be a semi-automatic, 24″ heavy-barreled .223 with a slow twist for high-velocity varmint loads. This is a precision rifle, not an assault weapon. It is well-designed, accurate and reliable.
This is not the same gun as the fully-automatic M-16 used by our military. Some of the parts are the same, but the weapon is configured differently for a different purpose.
An AR-15 set up for varmint hunting is not an assault weapon, no matter how much it might LOOK like an M-16. The gun fires one round for each trigger pull, much like your Remington 750 WoodsMaster. The only difference there is that the WoodsMaster shoots a bigger round and has about twice as much power as the typical AR-15. Oh, and the AR-15 has a very scary-looking pistol-grip handle. Oooh scary.
The AR-15 can also be configured for National Match High-Power competition, and is once again a SEMI-automatic rifle, like the Ruger 10-22 rifle you hunted squirrels with as a kid. It fires one round for each time the trigger is pulled. It does not “spray” bullets. It is not an assault weapon. This is also a precision rifle. It is more powerfull that a .22, but not nearly as powerful as a typical .270 caliber deer rifle.
The term “assault weapon” has been bandied-about to deamonize any gun they choose to lump into that category. It’s a great way to rile up the general populace who know less than nothing about guns.
But a true assault weapon would have to be a FULLY-automatic machine gun that sprays bullets. I have never heard of ANYONE hunting with one of those.
The AR-15 is an amazingly versatile rifle with many years of research and development behind it, a huge aftermarket supply of parts, and a huge following.
Remember that the people who classified it as an “assault weapon” are the same people who classified the Marlin Model 60 .22 caliber rifle the same way. You probably had one of those when you were a kid. Oooooh scary.
March 1st, 2007 at 12:12 am
Just a few random observations on how I feel about the Jim Zumbo controversy. I had an early AR15 and sold it cheap, not accurate enough. Now it legally is an assualt weapon and I could not buy 20-round magazines anyway in California if I wanted to. My S&W .357 shoots each time I pull the trigger so it must be an assault weapon. It is for deranged felons who should not have guns whether they pause to reload or not. The store in San Francisco where I bought my last single shot rifle is now closed. When I carry it in Idaho some people dressed in purple follow me with boomboxes and scare the elk in my direction. My last visit to Cody a local gal gave me a signed book that condemned deer hunting and makes me smile. Jim jokes at sport shows that 4WD gets you stuck that much farther back in the mountains and shows his truck in snow up to the handles. The Gospel of Nosler says One-Shot Chuck Yeager gave Jim a Weatherby so he would have a ‘good’ gun. Zumbo may not deserve a Pulitzer prize any more than the Dixie Chicks deserved a Grammy but I want to see the movie about this when it comes out. Jim has apologized like a man and generally done alright for himself. We all have missed (or made) shots we would rather forget, but we must press on.
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:36 pm
A fellow on http://www.shotgunworld.com gave us this explaination of Mr. Zumbo’s original post with a definition of “Terrorist Rifle”.
“If you hunt deer with a deer rifle and you hunt turkey with a turkey gun, then the rifle used to hunt terrorists is a terrorist rifle. Thus, the AR-15 (M-16/M4)is indeed a terrorist rifle. And a damn fine one at that.”
March 4th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
[…] For the full text of Zumbo’s post and his follow-up mea culpa: Hunting Sense. […]
March 15th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Victor you are missing the point as is mr zumbo the 2nd amendment has nothing to do with hunting i could really care less if it is banned for hunting since i dont use mine for that however it is chambered in a very capable varmint round and some people choose to hunt with it so i will fight for their right to do so however to call for an all out ban on these rifles is ignorant just because they look scary we should ban them? just because bad people sometimes do bad things with them they should be banned? bad people do bad things with lots of guns that are more mainstream and bad things with things other than guns so should we ban all these items as well? get a clue
Aaron
March 29th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
You’re all a bunch of sickos, you cowards who get off on shooting things for fun. I wish you would go hunt each other until you’re all dead.
March 29th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
If we’re all ’sickos’ what are you doing here reading? Wouldn’t wishing we’d all go hunt each other until we’re all dead classify you as ’sociopathic’? The Mental Health Society says, “Yes!” Food for thought.
Thanks for posting, though.
Cliff
October 1st, 2007 at 3:49 pm
I’m a little late to the table. But I agree with Jim’s original comment and some of the others who posted commments. Why the hell would anyone need an assualt rifle to bring down a prairie dog? I hunt and fish and never would I think a hunter so irresponsible or pathetic that they would need AR/AK to bring down any animal…let alone a rodent. These are the situations that make those ani-gun folks smile…think about it.
November 19th, 2007 at 11:42 am
Clearly, after 6 months or so to cool off, the industry is ignoring Zumbo. He’s the old guard, still thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt, and probably regards any gun not made of rare wood and blue-steel as a toy. Let him retire a bring in the new generation of hunters. It’s time to update the industry, as the manufacturers are showing with all the new designs and models.
An AR-design is a copy of an assault rifle. No “terrorist” would use a $1,000 gun that only has a 5-shot clip. The guy is a dolt, a fossil who needs to sit on his front porch and watch his kids play horse shoes. Thanks for all your service, Zumbo, here’s your watch and a map to Florida.
April 11th, 2008 at 12:52 am
Do you fairly think this is news? I like and read your blog to get necessary information, but sometimes melancholy kills me