Enjoy Your Ride, Zumbo

I've had this link burning in a Firefox window for nearly two whole days now. Don't bother: you can't get there from here. That's because Outdoor Life magazine took down the whole bleedin' blog. However, Claire Wolfe has dug it up in the Google cache. It's Jim Zumbo's "apology", for this.

Tam runs down the action between Friday evening and Monday morning. The upshot: after over four decades of writing about guns and shooting, Zumbo has set a new elapsed-time record for the famous Exploding Career Trick. I'm trying to think of the last time that I saw someone go skidding off the high-side with such alacrity, and it's just not coming to me.

Remington Arms simply summarily tossed his ass. Hi Mountain Seasonings is ditching him as fast as they can, and I'm told that Zumbo's Outdoor Channel TV show did not appear as scheduled on Monday evening. Mossy Oak iced their relationship with Zumbo, pronto.

This is justice in action. These are not times for craven, flubber-spined, and supine throat-displays to tyranny by someone with the firearms authority that Zumbo carried until he spoke his mind on the matter of "assault weapons". If his sense of fashion does not permit him to carry an AR-15 in the woods, then he should not do so, but he has no right to call for their prohibition. "Opinion" be damned. When an "opinion" demands the suppression of other peoples' rights, then it is to be completely condemned as wrong for its disconnect from the facts of reality. It is a fact that the essence by which to define a "terrorist" is not the weapon that he uses, but the use to which he puts a weapon. I am fully aware that, in this day and age, a statement like that arrives with such blinding acuity that untold millions of utterly stupid people will simply not be able to see it. However, there are enough remaining who can to dispose of a punk like Zumbo by popular market demand, and that's good enough for today.

On the matter of Outdoor Life pulling Zumbo's blog, Glenn Reynolds says it "seems like overkill". This is a case of his enthusiasm for blogging getting away from him. He gets to sit around and type bullshit like that because he's not the one who has to bear the market load of Zumbo's judy-boy horseshit the way that Outdoor Life does. Claire is exactly correct in her take on Outdoor Life. They are not to blame for Zumbo's "dumb blurt". Until this writing, however, they have looked like a high-school kid torn between two fashion cliques in the lunchroom: witness the equivocation tagged to the end of Zumbo's original post. Yes; they did finally ditch the blog, "for the time being".

That's simply not enough.

Zumbo tried to palm-off an "apology" based in the fact of his exhaustion after a hard day on the trail, his ignorance, then pleaded with patriotism and name-dropping, and then asserted himself as "your best friend if you're a hunter or shooter". He says: "I simply screwed up."

No: he is "screwed up". This sort of stupidity is simply unbearable in someone who held the position that he did in this realm. As a working pro for four decades, it was his job to be able to see through this issue to the right thing and then stand on it. He simply has no room to even attempt wiggling through this thing, because of the times in which he worked at the living that he did. Get this, and get it good: there simply is no way to ignore the politics surrounding firearms, and there hasn't been for decades, now, and when you venture to address the politics of the thing, you'd better be on the side of freedom when you do, because this is one of the last flags to defend in this Land of The Herding Eloi, and there are enough people out there to defend it against a useless, contemptible, creep like Jim Zumbo, even if they're not going to prevail against the likes of Mrs. McCarthy of New York.

You can go straight to hell, Zumbo. You've earned the ride, in spades Business Class.