Friday, February 23, 2007

Filet Zumbo   [John Derbyshire]

The world of Second Amendment rights has been roiled this past few days by the case of Jim Zumbo.  For full background do a Google News search on "Zumbo" (good thing he wasn't Jim Smith).

There's a summary here with some illuminating comments.

"On Friday evening, a gunwriter who was apparently tired of his 42-year career put his word processor in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

"Ten years ago, had his statement survived the editorial process and made it into print, we would have seen a handful of cherry-picked letters on the 'Letters to the Editor' page of Outdoor life, and things would have pretty much proceeded along at status quo ante. Not now. Not today.

"Here's what happens today:

"Friday Night: Jim Zumbo, a paid writer of the old-school print and TV media, posts his now-legendary screwup on his new-fangled blog, without benefit of editorial restraint. [He offhandedly referred to a certain category of rifles as 'terrorist weapons'—JD]

"Saturday Night: The news breaks on ARFCOM, one of the busiest internet gun boards, with almost 200,000 members..."

[Derb] I'll leave you to read the rest for yourself.  The POLITICAL message here is the tremendous passion & solidarity of gun enthusiasts.  (Plus, of course, as the above writer stresses, the power of the Internet.)  We've all been ruminating on the need for Rudy Giuliani to do some hard thinking & plain talking about those social issues on which he is too liberal for a lot of Republicans:  abortion, homosexual unions, gun rights.  It may be that the greatest of these is gun rights.  We folk at NRO being mainly a bunch of flabby Metrocons, perhaps we tend to underestimate this issue.  Let's hope Rudy doesn't.

02/23 09:52 AMShare