It is Time For the Jim Zumbo Poll

How can you let someone go that has been writing for you since 1962!!! How can his audience be so unforgiving!! He apologized. Jim is a great guy and we all know this.

What an unfortunate event. Everyone is so scared of words and of their own rear end, only interested in the bottom line and in themselves. No one can speak their mind these days for fear of repercussions. We need to find a way to uplift a good guy. He has been there for us with great stories and advice, not to mention some great recipes on what to do with the precious kill you drag home no matter how you shot it. No one wants to feel terror even the animals we eat or the writers you chew up and spit out in public. You don’t ruin a man’s career just because he is not been updated on the subject.

Peace!

Where the hell are we supposed to VOTE???

It is over to the left (near the top) in the sidebar here at the blog.

Jim Zumbo is one of the best outdoor writers of our time.
No he should not be fired or looked down on for his belief’s.
Respectfully, Paul Kaiser

MadJack are you mad because you can’t find the polling place?

An unfortunate side effect of all the hullabaloo that led to Jim Zumbo getting fired was that the story became a lot bigger than it really needed to be.

If people had just commented that Jim was wrong and helped him see his error we would have been fine. Instead it became a crusade and became such a big story that the mainstream news media discovered it. Unfortuantely, there protrayal of events in the mainstream media has largely been detrimental to the hunting community.

So basically what happened is a respected member of the hunting community was fired for expressing a viewpoint and the anti-hunting community has been handed a thousand new ways to portray hunters as thugs and vigilantes on a silver platter. It may be that many of the media would have portrayed hunters in that light anyway, but did we have to help them do it?

Outdoor Life should’ve had a simple disclaimer in place for blogs, opinions, not necessarilly the views of, etc.

The magazine execs are saying he wasn’t fired:

“He offered to resign,” she said from her New York office. “It’s been a really tough time for us. It’s been really painful. We certainly learned how many people in the shooting community are online.”

Link to above quote:
http://www.newsobserver.com/122/story/548243.html

New management jitters? I seem to remember Outdoor Life (and some other prominent outdoor titles) changing hands not too long ago. Wiki says they’re owned by Time4 which is also ringing a bell, but only says they “de-emphasized” in 2006.

Wiki link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outdoor_Life

By the way, are there any link codes (HTML, etc) allowed in comments?

Anyway, I’m voting “No Way”. Zumbo’s original quote had a whole bunch of “maybe I’m a traditionalist”, and “in my opinion”, maybe this, maybe that… Maybe he said something dumb. I say dumb things at work all the time, this comment for example. Not fired yet…

Like many things people say this has been this has been made into a very big deal about some ones opinon.
I happen to agree with Jim, I do not own or hunt with asault rifles. With all the great traditional rifles why do we need asault rifles for hunting?
Eight hunter I knew were shot with an auto asault rifle, if the Hmong who shot the hunters was hunting with a bolt action three shot rifle like many hunters use,all eight peoplepeople would not have been shoot.
I think poeple should have the right to own whatever they want, but they do not need to be used for hunting.

RICE LAKE, WI HUNTER

Zumbo lost sight of the real picture. Hunting is a sport, no matter what rifle you use.

I remember when the traditional blackpowders bickered with the inline percussion black powder shooters. Both get the job done, but I don’t hear anyone calling a muzzle loader a terrorist weapon. It is a sport no matter if you use a pellet rifle, or a AR15. If Zumbo wants to drive a Toyota 4 door sedan out in a patch of Purple Sage to hunt, I wouldn’t call for everyone to ban him because he didn’t drive a truck, or a quad some magazine told him to buy.

Well whenever you call anygun a terriost gun and say the word ban in the same sentence and then gun haters start qouteing you and then your suposed to be a gun enthusit
your just a big idiot who let his readers down himself down and his 2nd amendment down . if he thought he was right why did he Apologizes twice !
idiots

I voted “Yes I think so” because while Zumbo’s comments were clearly inappropriate, his future relationship to outdoor life is between him and them. I think offering his resignation and their accepting is a fair way to handle the matter. I am more inclined to support them in the action they chose than to tell them what action to take.

I hope that Zumbo can find forgiveness by those personally close to him and have a good life outside of the public eye. We should accept his withdrawal from mainstream sportsman writing with the same grace that he stepped down with.

Now if he can go after the Brady Campaign and condemn their use of his writings out of context, then he will start to earn back the respect he lost. I can respect the viewpoint that ARs and such shouldn’t be used for hunting if those with that viewpoint show more respect to those rifles and their owners than Zumbo did in his original posting. If he will take a stand behind the right to own ARs and AKs, he stands a much better chance of passing down his 375 H&H through the generations.

Zumbo did one of the most incredibly stupid things a public figure can do. He let his TRUE feelings be known. Many Fudd type hunters feel this way about “Black Rifles”. It’s a stupid thought train, and an even dumber position to take publicly. Yes, he has the right to feel the way he does, just as his sponsers have the right to can him. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you. He did. He’s unemployed because of it. A Darwin award is in order here. Bill T.