Compassionate Gun-Nuttery

John Derbyshire writes on the growing divide in the gun community between hunters and the non-hunting enthusiast crowd, as recently highlighted by the firestorm over Jim Zumbo's commentary on the infiltration into the hunting community of "terrorist rifles":

And that helps explain last week’s huge and passionate reaction to Jim Zumbo’s blog comment, the story of the year in shooting circles.

Zumbo is — though it would be more accurate, as we shall see, to say was — a writer, educator, and lecturer on outdoor sports, mainly hunting. He lives in a log cabin near Cody, Wyoming, and is a 42-year member of the National Rifle Association (who, by the way, have just started a spiffy “NAR News” website). He had a show on the Outdoor Channel, a column in Outdoor Life, and gun-company sponsors paying him retainers and helping fund his hunting trips. He was on the advisory board of the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance. Life was pretty good for Jim… until February 16.

That Friday Jim was out in the field in Wyoming on a coyote hunt with some other outdoor-sports writers and a couple of fellows from the Remington Arms Company. Back at camp, Jim filed a report on his Outdoor Life blog. In that report he passed some remarks about a certain category of long guns, popularly called “black rifles,” modeled on military assault rifles like the famous Soviet-made AK-47, or the ArmaLite favored by the Irish Republican Army. One of the guides had told Jim that these “black rifles” are often used to hunt coyotes with, a thing Jim apparently did not know. He sounded off about this on his blog:

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. … 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 [sic] and woods.

The gun websites lit up like a Hamas wedding party using tracer rounds. At the time of writing, a week later, Jim has lost his show, his columns, and his sponsors. He is penniless and disgraced. His lecture bookings will likely be canceled. I have not yet heard that he has been drummed out of the NRA, with Wayne LaPierre himself ripping off Jim’s buttons and epaulettes while the NRA band plays the Dead March from Saul, but it can only be a matter of time. Some of the stuff has been really vituperative — this, for instance. Note the graphics: “Jim Zumbo — Quisling is Spoken Here”; “P***ing on Your Gun Rights with Zumbo.” The piling-on was so intense it has spawned a new verb: “to zumbo,” meaning to annihilate, by use of the internet, the career of one who violates the solidarity of a common enterprise.

It was hard to find anyone speaking up on Zumbo’s behalf; though there were, along with the vituperation, some calls for civility from anti-Zumbo bloggers like author and outdoorsman Steve Bodio. (That blog of Steve’s, by the way, includes Jim Zumbo’s public apology, which of course did nothing to abate the storm.)

It helps to understand what’s going on if you remember that there are subcultures within the gun culture, and these subcultures do not always see eye to eye. There are the hunting-outdoors gun people; there are the target-shooting range people; there are the military-weapons buffs, the skeet-and-trap folk, home-security specialists, the antique-weapons crowd, and so on. (You know you’re graced with the presence of an antique-weapons enthusiast down at the range when you hear a sort of WHOOOMPF! and see a vast cloud of dense white smoke coming towards you. That was a pan of black powder going off.) Of course, there is lots of overlap — the range is always more crowded just before hunting season, as the hunters prepare for business — but there are frictions, too.

As the Zumbo case illustrates, the point of maximum friction is between hunters and the rest. There is a lurking suspicion among non-hunting gun sportsmen that the hunters will sell them down the river, if some clever politician can clinch the deal. As an e-correspondent of mine put it:

A problem with the duck hunter crowd is that politicians try to take away our handguns or my black rifles, but insist they’ll never go after your over-under. The duck hunters nod and let the confiscation proceed, and before long all that’s left are the duck hunters, who have no support as their shotguns are confiscated.

The mirror-image among hunters is a certain disdain for weapons that, in the hunter’s opinion, are no use in the field, or are in some way “unsporting.” This usually includes any weapon that can fire on fully automatic. If you imagine a 1920s street gangster bringing down a deer with a tommy gun, you will see their point. With some hunters, the prejudice extends to semi-automatics, or even to anything that just looks “military.”


What the Zumbo case shows is that these minor differences will be brushed aside when gun enthusiasts sense a threat to their rights. Hunting-outdoor sportsmen piled on with the rest — though in general, like Steve Bodio, with a bit more regard for civility. As I started out by saying, for all the magnificent achievements of the NRA in keeping gun rights secure, gun hobbyists and sportsmen live in a state of mild, if permanent, insecurity, and our natural posture is defensive.

The political lesson to be taken by any contender for the Republican nomination who is seriously short of creds on gun rights issues — no names, no pack drill — is that Second Amendment enthusiasts stand head and shoulders above other conservative groups in their passion and solidarity on behalf of their constitutional rights. You will need to work very hard and tread very carefully if you want the support of this large and well-organized constituency. Set a foot wrong and you could find yourself being zumboed!

Yes, even in the world of gun nuts, there are stratifications of class. The Zumbos of the world are very smug and satisfied with their Remington Model Seven CDL .308 at $907 with ammo that runs $1.50 a round, but what of the average working class schlub who can't afford such rich fare? He's forced by economic deprivation to resort to the international military surplus market. How could he pass on a Yugoslavian SKS carbine at $209, or an AK47 at $289? Not to speak of 7.62x39 ammo that runs $0.15 a round? Is it so wrong for Joe Lunchbucket to reach out for that golden ring of 2nd Amendment self affirmation? When the Black Helicopters come, can we rely on Wellington Sniffbottom III and his custom Ruger No.1 Tropical single shot .458 Win Mag to save the day? I think not!