NRA didn't doom Zumbo

Jim Zumbo (see here) made his living by providing a service to gun enthusiasts and shooters. He penned some very ill-considered remarks, which cost him the faith and allegiance of a large portion of his target audience and, ultimately, his job.

His contribution to hunting lore and/or Second Amendment discourse will not be missed; his contribution was neither unique nor particularly insightful. I will go so far as to say it will not even be noticed – nature (and media) abhors a vacuum, so someone will step up to provide those services previously tendered by Zumbo.

I note that some have accused the NRA (see comments on this post) of being behind the stunning amount or criticism directed at Zumbo. As a gun rights guy, on again/off again member of the NRA and hunter for 38 of my 46 years, I can say that I didn’t get the “rally ‘round the black gun” memo from my NRA masters. I found out about the blog post through Instapundit and left my own critical feedback at Zumbo’s blog all without consulting the talking points from my NRA overlords.

How can this have happened? How could such a swift outcry come without extensive orchestration, action alerts and form letters supplied by that monolithic repository of all evil, the NRA?

It’s because the NRA is just people..it has no evil, insidious power of its own. Zumbo got a mountain of critical responses because every one of those respondees was self-motivated to give him a piece of their mind, not because the NRA pulled some strings and made members dance to its macabre tune. Because of his position in the public eye, Zumbo was a de facto representative of the hunting and shooting communities. He was expected to be a learned advocate of the shooting sports. When he made damaging remarks antithetical to the beliefs of those communities, reaction was swift and he was removed.

He also lost most of his sponsors who, after all, depend on Zumbo’s former target audience for their business. His actions are akin to a US State Department official railing against this country as “The Great Satan,” or the Press Liaison from PETA showing up at a media affair in her new jaguar fur coat, munching a baby seal kabob and offering to share her favorite recipes for kitten tar tare. Both display conduct inappropriate to their position and should be removed immediately.

In each of the above cases, criticism of a behavior out-of-keeping with their position, would lead to dismissal. This previously may have been a drawn-out, dampened process, with letters and telephone calls – in the era of the internet, the reaction was instantaneous and overwhelming, something even the NRA is powerless to orchestrate.

The Zumbo fiasco was not an example of the power of the monolithic NRA, the group-think of gun owners (as there were many different reasons in comments critical of Zumbo’s post) or the injustice of a ravening lynch mob…it was an example of the power of the internet to give individual and equal voice to the common man.