Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Stuck His Keyboard in His Mouth and Pulled the Trigger

That is how Tamara described Outdoor Life editor Jim Zumbo when he ended his career rather suddenly over the weekend.

Zumbo wrote a blog post Friday night savaging the AR and AK variant rifles as "terrorist weapons" whose owners should be excluded from the brotherhood of gentleman hunters. Despite his status in the august pantheon of hunting journalists, he was apparently unaware that the AR-15 is a very popular varmint hunting gun and the SKS is the .30-30 lever-gun of the current hunting generation. Hunters and 2nd Amendment advocates were up in arms almost instantaneously. Opinion pieces on his original post (which has since been taken down) are available from Tamara, LawDog, Kim du Toit, and Geek with a .45. By the end of the weekend, Zumbo had lost his Remington sponsorship and had issued a poor apology.

I'm really proud of Remington on this one. While Remington makes the model 700, probably the world's premiere bolt-action sniper rifle, they don't actually make any assault weapons. Now they are bringing their tactical line of products up for sale to the general populace just to shore up their reputation. You have to wonder if Congress will notice all this, what with the new Assault Weapons Ban renewal appearing in the House Judiciary Committee last week.

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