Via AlanDP comes this, from The Shooting Wire. Read it all, and you might want to do it today, for as Alan says, they probably don't archive past articles....
...we might find that we owe Jim Zumbo.
We don't owe him our loyalty, our support, or our forgiveness, but we owe him for motivating us to tell the industry they'd better start paying attention to the silent majority.
...
Even if you call us "shooters" or "paper punchers" or "plinkers" or whatever, there are many more of us than there are hunters. And we're neither terrorists nor fools.
When I made the decision to begin The Shooting Wire, some outdoor writers questioned why I would start a "shooting" wire instead of a "hunting" wire.
Today, they know why.
The in the firearms industry, is not in hunting rifles. It is in those "terrorist" black guns (in a growing variety of calibers, further reflecting the platform's many useful applications) and the military-style handguns that accompany them. Ditto ammo and accessories. There are many, many manufacturers in the "black rifle" space - and more of them are coming.
...
So what have we learned, I asked Doug Painter of the National Shooting Sports Foundation?
"The important perspective from our side of the street," Painter said, "is that whether you hunt or shoot in competition or for sport with a primitive muzzleloader or the latest high-tech rifle, what links us is more important that what divides us. We may shoot cowboy, skeet, practical or whatever, but our common belief has to be the Second Amendment - everything else is just a matter of style."
He also had a sobering reminder.
"The flip side," he said, "is to remember our opponents have all of us in their crosshairs."
And he's right. Long after the Jim Zumbo controversy is over (it will probably never be forgotten - or forgiven), we will still face the ongoing assaults on our Second Amendment rights.
Now that we've discovered our voice - we must continue to apply it to our opponents.
--Jim Shepherd
Here's hoping he's right about the discovery of our common voice and thread. They are indeed after all of us, and after some 42 years of writing, Zumbo should have figured that out by now. The writing was on the wall long ago, with NFA '34 and GCA '68, and if Zumbo didn't see that, he had absolutely no business being in any kind of industry having anything to do with firearms. It's bad enough there are still people out there who think their hunting guns are safe from the insidious spin the antis use to demonize private firearm ownership, but for someone in his position to spout such malevolent rhetoric is absolutely inexcusable. He deserves exactly what he's getting.
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