Shortly, I will be heading out to a private military/law enforcement training facility to Roswell, NM with my friends from LWRC whose rifles are being featured on the TV program. www.lwrifles.com
I’ve done several magazine articles on LWRC’s piston AR rifles. Their piston design presents a dramatic leap in operational reliability and longevity. Since the bolt is actuated with a piston rather than hot, dirty gas bled from the barrel, the system runs cleaner and cooler. The dramatic reduction in chamber fouling increases reliability and the lower running temperature decreases the stress effects on component parts resulting in longer service life.
Knowing these advances were just the type of products that Future Weapons likes to feature, I tracked down the producers in England. Long story short, I got LWRC booked on the show.
The episode will cover LWRC’s entire product line including their standard 5.56 and 6.8 piston rifles and the new additions to their line up; a super short 6.8, a .308 and their .499 caliber AR.
My main purpose in joining them in NM is to have a ball! No, no… I meant that I will be participating in the production and will be writing a magazine article on the filming of the show.
Lots more info to come once the filming is done!
Friday, May 11, 2007
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Long gun or pistol in the home?
I read several gun related forums at various times to keep an ear out for product news what people are talking about. One topic constantly amazes me; the discussion of what type of firearm to use for home defense. The fascinating aspect is that, by far, most people talk about using a shotgun or a rifle and downplay the use a handgun. What AR should I use? Is buckshot OK inside? Is birdshot a better choice?
For me, I much prefer a handgun for most aspects of defending the inside of my home. I certainly acknowledge that long guns offer far better stopping power compared to a handgun, but the reason I prefer a handgun is because it is more practical.
Working within the confines of a typical home, the reality of dealing with light switches, doors, and family members often requires that one hand be available for extraneous use while the other operates the firearm. When the subject comes up in my tactical handgun classes, I have each participant in the class handle a shotgun while opening doors, activating light switches in the classroom and guiding family members to the a “safe room”. Inevitably, each student is forced to hold the shotgun with just one hand, usually for an extended time. Each time, often within ten seconds, the person quickly realizes how heavy and awkward it is to handle a shotgun with just one hand.
Let’s look at it from a naysayer’s point of view. “Light switches can be activated by shoulders and elbows while maintaining two hands on the long gun.” That may be true, but under extreme stress that method probably won’t be easy, plus, the instinctive method is to use your hands, and under extreme stress most people revert to what is instinctive. “It only takes a second to use a door knob”. Ok, I agree, that is true.
Some may say that “family members should be trained on what to do in a crisis and should not need to be directed.” Well, let’s be practical. How many of us have actually trained with our family members? Of those who have, do you drill often enough so that every member of the family is completely sure of what to do by instinct and won’t panic if an attack comes? Will your family know how to react if the event occurs differently than planned? Will anyone panic regardless of their training? What do you do if you have small children? In many, if not most cases, a leader must take charge, direct the family members, and ward off the attack.
Let’s say that you have trained yourself to open and close doors quickly, turn lights on and off with extraneous body parts, and you have no one else living with you. Is a handgun still the best choice? In my opinion, again, yes.
In order to not give your position away and to prevent a gun grab when negotiating travelways through the home, a gun should not protrude beyond a corner or through a doorway. To survey around a corner or pass through a doorway, a long gun must be lowered or raised to keep it from view. Due to its length and weight, that’s not easy to do, especially so with just one hand. Additionally, if you are limited to one hand, it’s not easy to get a long gun back on target in a hurry from a raised or lowered position. Whether you have one hand or two on your weapon, it is far easier to negotiate doorways with a handgun.
While a short-barreled rifle or shotgun is most often the weapon of choice for law enforcement entry teams, there is quite a difference between an entry team and a typical homeowner. First off, police are highly trained and practiced. Secondly, they are a team. One officer can operate the doors and deal with innocents while other members make entry and take care of business.
A long gun does have a presence in my home defense plan. In case of a home invasion, my plan consists of getting my handgun, gathering my family and directing them and myself to a “safe room.” This room is the one furthest the from anticipated entry location, one that is the easiest to get to and to defend, and one that has a cell phone and long guns. I plan to use my handgun to get my family safe, then defend my safe room with a long gun.
In reality, there is a lot more to planning a home defense than what is written here and the principles presented have been greatly simplified, but you can see that a handgun, does indeed, have plenty to offer in protecting your family and yourself.
For me, I much prefer a handgun for most aspects of defending the inside of my home. I certainly acknowledge that long guns offer far better stopping power compared to a handgun, but the reason I prefer a handgun is because it is more practical.
Working within the confines of a typical home, the reality of dealing with light switches, doors, and family members often requires that one hand be available for extraneous use while the other operates the firearm. When the subject comes up in my tactical handgun classes, I have each participant in the class handle a shotgun while opening doors, activating light switches in the classroom and guiding family members to the a “safe room”. Inevitably, each student is forced to hold the shotgun with just one hand, usually for an extended time. Each time, often within ten seconds, the person quickly realizes how heavy and awkward it is to handle a shotgun with just one hand.
Let’s look at it from a naysayer’s point of view. “Light switches can be activated by shoulders and elbows while maintaining two hands on the long gun.” That may be true, but under extreme stress that method probably won’t be easy, plus, the instinctive method is to use your hands, and under extreme stress most people revert to what is instinctive. “It only takes a second to use a door knob”. Ok, I agree, that is true.
Some may say that “family members should be trained on what to do in a crisis and should not need to be directed.” Well, let’s be practical. How many of us have actually trained with our family members? Of those who have, do you drill often enough so that every member of the family is completely sure of what to do by instinct and won’t panic if an attack comes? Will your family know how to react if the event occurs differently than planned? Will anyone panic regardless of their training? What do you do if you have small children? In many, if not most cases, a leader must take charge, direct the family members, and ward off the attack.
Let’s say that you have trained yourself to open and close doors quickly, turn lights on and off with extraneous body parts, and you have no one else living with you. Is a handgun still the best choice? In my opinion, again, yes.
In order to not give your position away and to prevent a gun grab when negotiating travelways through the home, a gun should not protrude beyond a corner or through a doorway. To survey around a corner or pass through a doorway, a long gun must be lowered or raised to keep it from view. Due to its length and weight, that’s not easy to do, especially so with just one hand. Additionally, if you are limited to one hand, it’s not easy to get a long gun back on target in a hurry from a raised or lowered position. Whether you have one hand or two on your weapon, it is far easier to negotiate doorways with a handgun.
While a short-barreled rifle or shotgun is most often the weapon of choice for law enforcement entry teams, there is quite a difference between an entry team and a typical homeowner. First off, police are highly trained and practiced. Secondly, they are a team. One officer can operate the doors and deal with innocents while other members make entry and take care of business.
A long gun does have a presence in my home defense plan. In case of a home invasion, my plan consists of getting my handgun, gathering my family and directing them and myself to a “safe room.” This room is the one furthest the from anticipated entry location, one that is the easiest to get to and to defend, and one that has a cell phone and long guns. I plan to use my handgun to get my family safe, then defend my safe room with a long gun.
In reality, there is a lot more to planning a home defense than what is written here and the principles presented have been greatly simplified, but you can see that a handgun, does indeed, have plenty to offer in protecting your family and yourself.
Barrett's Long Range Basics class - Magazine Article
I had the privilege of attending Barrett's Long Range Basics class a few months ago in Raton, New Mexico for an article assignment for the Barrett annual publication. Participants received training as a depot level armor, marksmanship skills, ranging, scope adjustments, and had lots of range time with the big 50. Starting at 200, we worked our way back to shooting at 1,000 yards. After that experience, the 200-yard range at my local club looks tiny! This class was very educational and a lot of fun. It certainly gave me the bug for long distance shooting.
Barrett Long Range Basics.pdf
Barrett Long Range Basics.pdf
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Ammunition Choice
One of the most vexing concerns in carrying a firearm is the choice of ammunition. What makes it confusing it that it is very difficult for the average shooter to determine the difference between offerings due to the fact that the effects can not be easily visualized.
The good news is that with the high quality of today’s ammunition, the differences between different manufactures and bullet designs is not very distinct. Meaning that most defensive ammunition from the top brands will work effectively. That statement could not have beeen made a decade or two ago as the art of bullet design has advanced tremendously in the last few years.
Here’s some guidelines for picking the right ammunition;
1. Pick an ammunition that works 100% of the time in your gun. Revolvers do not have feeding issues so reliability tests are not needed, but you MUST ammo test your semi-auto. For me, I won’t carry a gun and ammunition combination unless it can feed at least 200 rounds in a row flawlessly. If it fails, I either change ammo or send the gun to the smith, or both. Realizing the high cost of quality carry ammo, this can get expensive, but if you are going to bet your life on your gun, you have to know it’s going to work.
2. Pick an ammunition that works 100% of the time in your gun.
3. Pick an ammunition that works 100% of the time in your gun. See a pattern here?
4. Use hollow points. Round nose, often called full metal jacket (FMJ) tend to go right through the target with relatively little damage. Not only does this greatly reduce stopping power, the over penetration
puts bystanders at risk. Hollow points are designed to expand (often to 150% of their original size), produce maximum wound cavities, and expend all of their energy inside the target—thus offering maximum stopping power. While hollow point bullets may seem “mean” and “extra deadly” to the uninformed, they are very easy to justify in court if needed. As a public-safety point of view, hollow-points are safer because they are less likely to over penetrate and hit bystanders behind the assailant, compared to round nose bullets. 
With the greater stopping power of hollow-points, fewer bullets would need to be fired, which increases overall chances of the attacker’s survival. Lastly, every local and federal law enforcement agency uses them. As of this date, I believe New Jersey outlaws the use of hollow points so it is important to make sure hollow-points are legal in your state!
In the past, I advised that since most of today’s high-quality carry ammunition performs pretty much the same, so it really didn’t matter what you carried as long as it functioned in your gun properly. Recently, that has changed as there is a new cartridge on the market which outperforms most others; the Corbon DPX (Deep penetrating round.) DPX testing has shown it to perform better in both hard cover (doors, glass) penetration tests and in soft penetration tests (gelatin, and four-layer denim gelatin.) Rather than fragmenting when hitting hard objects, DPX is able to hold together to offer good terminal ballistics even after passing through objects yet does not over penetrate when hitting soft tissue because of its expansion. A good test of how a bullet would perform through heavy clothing in the gelatin test is shoot through four layers of denim before entering the gelatin. Most traditional bullets tend to clog up in the demin test while DPX goes right through and still expands properly in the gelatin. DPX is loaded in all of my guns.
NOTE— The last paragraph may seem to contradict my opening statement that most quality defensive ammo performs roughly the same. DPX does perform better in some circumstances but that does not mean the other bullet design are not effective. It is important to understand that there is no magic bullet. A bullet is ONLY effective if you do your part; hit the target in the vital areas with multiple shots. It is vital that you keep shooting until the threat is stopped.
As long as you are using a cartridge designed for self-defense (not target use) by a top name brand manufacturer your choice of bullet is not as important as your ability to properly hit your target. The best performing bullet in the world won’t be effective if you don’t place your shots well.
The good news is that with the high quality of today’s ammunition, the differences between different manufactures and bullet designs is not very distinct. Meaning that most defensive ammunition from the top brands will work effectively. That statement could not have beeen made a decade or two ago as the art of bullet design has advanced tremendously in the last few years.
Here’s some guidelines for picking the right ammunition;
1. Pick an ammunition that works 100% of the time in your gun. Revolvers do not have feeding issues so reliability tests are not needed, but you MUST ammo test your semi-auto. For me, I won’t carry a gun and ammunition combination unless it can feed at least 200 rounds in a row flawlessly. If it fails, I either change ammo or send the gun to the smith, or both. Realizing the high cost of quality carry ammo, this can get expensive, but if you are going to bet your life on your gun, you have to know it’s going to work.
2. Pick an ammunition that works 100% of the time in your gun.
3. Pick an ammunition that works 100% of the time in your gun. See a pattern here?
4. Use hollow points. Round nose, often called full metal jacket (FMJ) tend to go right through the target with relatively little damage. Not only does this greatly reduce stopping power, the over penetration
puts bystanders at risk. Hollow points are designed to expand (often to 150% of their original size), produce maximum wound cavities, and expend all of their energy inside the target—thus offering maximum stopping power. While hollow point bullets may seem “mean” and “extra deadly” to the uninformed, they are very easy to justify in court if needed. As a public-safety point of view, hollow-points are safer because they are less likely to over penetrate and hit bystanders behind the assailant, compared to round nose bullets. 
With the greater stopping power of hollow-points, fewer bullets would need to be fired, which increases overall chances of the attacker’s survival. Lastly, every local and federal law enforcement agency uses them. As of this date, I believe New Jersey outlaws the use of hollow points so it is important to make sure hollow-points are legal in your state!In the past, I advised that since most of today’s high-quality carry ammunition performs pretty much the same, so it really didn’t matter what you carried as long as it functioned in your gun properly. Recently, that has changed as there is a new cartridge on the market which outperforms most others; the Corbon DPX (Deep penetrating round.) DPX testing has shown it to perform better in both hard cover (doors, glass) penetration tests and in soft penetration tests (gelatin, and four-layer denim gelatin.) Rather than fragmenting when hitting hard objects, DPX is able to hold together to offer good terminal ballistics even after passing through objects yet does not over penetrate when hitting soft tissue because of its expansion. A good test of how a bullet would perform through heavy clothing in the gelatin test is shoot through four layers of denim before entering the gelatin. Most traditional bullets tend to clog up in the demin test while DPX goes right through and still expands properly in the gelatin. DPX is loaded in all of my guns.
NOTE— The last paragraph may seem to contradict my opening statement that most quality defensive ammo performs roughly the same. DPX does perform better in some circumstances but that does not mean the other bullet design are not effective. It is important to understand that there is no magic bullet. A bullet is ONLY effective if you do your part; hit the target in the vital areas with multiple shots. It is vital that you keep shooting until the threat is stopped.
As long as you are using a cartridge designed for self-defense (not target use) by a top name brand manufacturer your choice of bullet is not as important as your ability to properly hit your target. The best performing bullet in the world won’t be effective if you don’t place your shots well.
Clearing Jam and Malfunctions - Magazine Article
Handguns magazine published the following article that I wrote on clearing jams and malfunctions with semi-automatic handguns. Enjoy.
jamsandmalfunctions.pdf
jamsandmalfunctions.pdf
Saturday, March 24, 2007
The Zumbo Effect
Thanks to Jim Zumbo, we now have two new phrases; “Let’s Zumbo him” meaning “to act against an unacceptable infringement on our rights” and “a negligent discharge of the mouth” which I coined myself.
As you probably know, Jim Zumbo, a prominent hunting writer, stated in his blog that he equates AR owners with terrorists among other anti-gun statements. Within hours, there were over 3000 comments bashing his statement and another 3000+ comments bashing his rather hollow apology. Within three days, he lost all of his sponsorships, his editorial jobs, and his TV show.
Without spending much more time on the details, the issue is this; all gun owners must stick together and fight for our collective rights. Riflemen, hunters, and handgunners are all gun owners and must work together to maintain the 2nd amendment. If gun owners would petition Congress with the zealousness that they attacked Zumbo, gun control would evaporate!
Here’s an article that Gary Cananzey — a friend of mine who has actually hunted with and immensely respects Jim Zumbo—submitted to OutdoorLife magazine. Since he has not heard back by now, Gary figures that it won’t see the light of day with OL so it might as well get out the same way Jim’s Zumbo’s comments did, by the internet.
David
- - -
“United We Stand.” You know the rest!
Recently, perhaps the industry’s greatest outdoor writer made a mistake. He equated AR-15 owners with terrorists. Jim forgot why we own guns. And, he forgot that all of their uses are protected. As a matter of fact, the very guns and use he decried are the most absolutely protected.
Jim Zumbo had every right, both to have and to voice his opinion. Unfortunately, Jim is not some pampered 26-year-old movie star with a liberal arts degree who thinks just because he gets face time on TV that he’s a political expert. We take the spoiled, adolescent and pampered Hollywood elite for what they are.
I’ve had the honor, and honor it was, of spending some time with Jim Zumbo in a hunting camp. He is all that he portrays himself to be and more. I, like many others, have spent decades reading Jim’s work while he spent those years crafting perfectly worded accounts of what he did and how he did it and we’ve all, young and old, lived vicariously through those adventures. Unfortunately Jim, like many others who’ve reached that level of stardom, transitioned from telling us what they did and how, to telling us what to do. You don’t expect wisdom from a 26-year-old; you do from a Jim Zumbo. Knowledge, is knowing what to say. Wisdom, is knowing if you should say it. Words and actions can be divisive and Jim’s stuck us all where it hurts the most. But, for the good of what we do and who we are, we need to get past beating Jim and address the cause of our great discontent, as even the best of us are allowed to get it wrong every now and then.
Did you ever marvel at a weed sitting in the center of a crack that goes completely through a 100-ton granite boulder, its roots protruding everywhere you looked, and wonder how something so small could have such an inexorable effect on something so immoveable? The massive boulder cracked because a seemingly inconsequential weed managed to get a roothold in some miniscule chink in its armor then time and persistence killed the great beast. The same happens with the divisiveness of man.
Ever wonder why when radical Muslims are not killing us they are killing each other over what seems to us to be indecipherable religious nuances? Does the logic of their all devoutly believing in the same God; yet still killing each other’s children over some trivial religious disagreement confuse you? Aren’t you thankful that our own culture is past feeding on itself? I used to think that there was no American correlation to the radical Muslim behavior and I’m sorry to say that I was completely wrong. The issue is not radical Muslim behavior; the issue is human behavior!
I have been involved with hunting, the shooting sports, and gun ownership for a very long time. At one time my passion even found me owning a couple archery stores where, for the first time I had to deal with the public. We catered to all the various archery pursuits and while I use archery as an example, the problem is universal to all the shooting and hunting sports.
On many occasions I had to break up disputes among customers who acted more like warring factions than fraternal participants in the sport of archery. Traditional longbow archer customers not only thought of the compound bow shooters as the great unwashed, but also felt that the recurve shooters where heretics for straying from the true path, and in turn the wheel-bow shooters thought the traditionalists were all relics. The 50% let-off shooters looked down on the 65% let-off shooters and everybody thought the 80% let-off shooters were simply sissies. These feuds were further exacerbated by organizations like Pope and Young who established that animals taken with 50% and 65% let-off bows could be entered into the record book, but not those taken with the 80% let-off bows. The manufacturers weighed in on the whole thing by making 80s almost exclusively. The whole argument revolved around what was and was not considered to be the definition of proper “BOWHUNTING.” These were fully grown men almost coming to blows over nuances. And the younger men and women were watching and taking sides; “You’re not a archer if you……”
To make matters worse, the problems repeatedly reached the print media. Specialty publications where full of the same things, “Be ware of the Dark Side.” “Our way is the only way to salvation”. We saw the traditionalists lobby legislatures trying to get special hunting seasons that would have precluded compound archery participation. Rifle, shotgun, and muzzleloader hunter groups all followed suit, each trying to carve their piece of the rock at the other’s expense.
The disparaging remarks and infighting eventually escalated between Cap and Ball muzzleloader people and the Inline muzzleloader group. We had disputes between the optical sight and iron sight folks and then between the traditional Cap and Ballers and the traditional Flintlock shooters for all the same reasons. We see it continue with nearly whole sectors of sports not supporting the others, shotgunners not supporting handgunners, and hunters not supporting riflemen. The list, sadly, goes on and on. Human nature promotes us to congregate with those who have similar interests then subdivides each specialty and nuance until everyone hates everyone. We must recognize this and consciously work to avoid it.
Think about it, there are tens of millions of us and combined we would be the greatest political force in this country, yet we fight amongst ourselves over nuance. We fractionalize and mitigate our own importance simply because it’s not enough for us to just not do what someone else does, we need to degrade and denounce it because we don’t do it. We need to mark our territory. We need to establish ourselves in the pecking order ahead of the next guy. And all the while we are doing it our enemies circle above us like vultures waiting for the weakest among us to fall out of step. They pick us, or in this case our rights, off one by one. Like the weed, they look for the beginnings of a crack, which we most likely started for them, and they make it wider, separating the smaller pieces over and over until there’s just sand left. We are doing this to ourselves. Our enemies have not the strength of numbers, the facts, nor the intelligence to defeat us, so we fight amongst ourselves and do the heavy lifting for them.
Jim’s words hurt sportsmen on many levels. Primarily, it pitted one congregation of the shooting sports against another. Nothing hurts more than the strike of a friend. The backlash was immediate and it was massive. The disciples of the black rifle took it personally. They were tired of being attacked by outsiders and would not stand for an attack from inside.
Jim’s comments exacerbated the rift between disciplines. I, for one, consider all shooters to be part of a sacred brotherhood. Whether it be hunting, sport, or defense, we are all of the same ilk. I fear that others who used to think the same way will now see hunters —and anyone else not of the same discipline — as different from the pack. Lastly, we will see Jim’s thoughts used against the entire shooting sport as his words are resounded and repeated by those working diligently to take all our rights away.
We often see those in the hunting, archery, and clay-shooting disciplines decry the rights of those involved in self-defense far more often than the reverse. While it may have happened, I have never heard of an owner of an AR-15 bemoaning the existence of hunting rifles.
The most ironic aspect of this is what it is that is truly protected by our Constitution. It’s time someone simply said the dirty little secret out loud. The bow hunting magazines won’t do it because they’re interested in bow hunting; the hunting magazines won’t take the position because they’re only interested in hunting. The shooting magazines don’t want to draw attention to the fact that there are thirty million of us with guns, so no one says it. This isn’t about hunting or shooting, it’s about the right to “keep and bear arms”. PERIOD!
That’s all it is and we need to realize that or it’s not going to matter if you think that shotguns are enough, or that bows are the right way, or that assault weapons, or IPSC are your things, because if we can’t get it through our collective heads that we need to be one voice first and foremost, if we can’t rally around “One for all and all for one” it’s not a mater of if we lose, we’re just marking time until we lose.
After the Second World War a German reverend was asked why the people hadn’t simply stood up to the Nazis in the beginning. He said, “well first they came for the socialists, but we weren’t socialists, so we said nothing, and then they came for the gypsies, but we weren’t gypsies, so we said nothing. Then they came for the Jews, but we weren’t Jews, so we said nothing. “And after a long litany he said “and when they finally came for us there was no one left to say anything.”
They will come for our shotgun and hunting rifle just as they have come for handguns and so-called assault weapons. The only way to end the tyranny against our rights is for all members of the shooting sports to work together as one. Clay shooters must protect the right to self-defense as much as bow hunters must protect the rights of target shooters. Divisiveness will only allow the weed of the anti-gunners to destroy the rock of our rights.
The thing that no one wants to say is this; our founders gave us the right to keep and bear arms for two reasons only; the first is implicit in the second. The first is that we be able to protect and defend our loved ones, our property and ourselves. The second is that we have the ability and the right to overthrow, that’s right, revolt against our own government if it becomes unresponsive to, or abusive of the needs and rights of the People. Period!
They meant that we should have weapons capable of fighting against those supplied to an army by that unresponsive government. They did not guarantee a right to hunt, to shoot clay pigeons, or bow hunt. Those things were implied by “to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”.
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
You will notice that only the words State and People are capitalized. Obviously these words and their connotation were of great import to the congress. Clearly the signers wanted there to be no ambiguity about the importance of the People and their right to bear arms.
This capitalization was not a mistake or a typo. You may have doubts, but consider that 220 years ago, 40 dedicated and educated men, after fully ten years of thought and deliberation took the time to review each individual word in our Constitution and were unanimously agreed to each one used in the text of the most specific and important democratic document ever written. For anyone to claim that they meant anything other than what they said they meant is foolish. These were learned and deliberate men.
I don’t duck hunt. I did, but I don’t anymore, but you can. I’m into tonnage now. Yep trophies, another thing Jim Zumbo is now against, but you hunt what and how you want with what you want and so will I. I own several duck guns and several field guns, however I haven’t shot at a pheasant for years and fully expect not to for years, but you go ahead. I don’t shoot trap, or skeet, or sporting clays or even whitetail anymore, but I’m glad that millions do. All I want to do is hunt Africa now and while I could, if I were shortsighted or overly opinionated, make a great case that ten grand for a shotgun to shoot clay is ridiculous, I’d have to then deal with my building several $5,000 hunting rifles each year that I may never use more than once, or face the fact that I also like owning and building ARs and military weapons. It’s my right, yours too, but you do what makes you happy and so will I!
I, by the rights given to me by some very smart men, have the right to voice my positive or negative opinion about the guns you own or how you pursue your little piece of the gifts our second amendment allows, but I must remember to remember that whatever you shoot or don’t shoot is your right and I would be the first one out the door with mine to protect yours. And while Jim and many like him may have forgotten that, please don’t you forget it!
-- Gary Cananzey
Gary Cananzey has hunted large and small game across most of North American and is now focused on hunting Africa. He is an avid gun collector, precision rifle shooter, handgunner, and managing partner of American Hunting Albums, a manufacturer of photo storage products for hunters.
As you probably know, Jim Zumbo, a prominent hunting writer, stated in his blog that he equates AR owners with terrorists among other anti-gun statements. Within hours, there were over 3000 comments bashing his statement and another 3000+ comments bashing his rather hollow apology. Within three days, he lost all of his sponsorships, his editorial jobs, and his TV show.
Without spending much more time on the details, the issue is this; all gun owners must stick together and fight for our collective rights. Riflemen, hunters, and handgunners are all gun owners and must work together to maintain the 2nd amendment. If gun owners would petition Congress with the zealousness that they attacked Zumbo, gun control would evaporate!
Here’s an article that Gary Cananzey — a friend of mine who has actually hunted with and immensely respects Jim Zumbo—submitted to OutdoorLife magazine. Since he has not heard back by now, Gary figures that it won’t see the light of day with OL so it might as well get out the same way Jim’s Zumbo’s comments did, by the internet.
David
- - -
United We Stand
“United We Stand.” You know the rest!
Recently, perhaps the industry’s greatest outdoor writer made a mistake. He equated AR-15 owners with terrorists. Jim forgot why we own guns. And, he forgot that all of their uses are protected. As a matter of fact, the very guns and use he decried are the most absolutely protected.
Jim Zumbo had every right, both to have and to voice his opinion. Unfortunately, Jim is not some pampered 26-year-old movie star with a liberal arts degree who thinks just because he gets face time on TV that he’s a political expert. We take the spoiled, adolescent and pampered Hollywood elite for what they are.
I’ve had the honor, and honor it was, of spending some time with Jim Zumbo in a hunting camp. He is all that he portrays himself to be and more. I, like many others, have spent decades reading Jim’s work while he spent those years crafting perfectly worded accounts of what he did and how he did it and we’ve all, young and old, lived vicariously through those adventures. Unfortunately Jim, like many others who’ve reached that level of stardom, transitioned from telling us what they did and how, to telling us what to do. You don’t expect wisdom from a 26-year-old; you do from a Jim Zumbo. Knowledge, is knowing what to say. Wisdom, is knowing if you should say it. Words and actions can be divisive and Jim’s stuck us all where it hurts the most. But, for the good of what we do and who we are, we need to get past beating Jim and address the cause of our great discontent, as even the best of us are allowed to get it wrong every now and then.
Did you ever marvel at a weed sitting in the center of a crack that goes completely through a 100-ton granite boulder, its roots protruding everywhere you looked, and wonder how something so small could have such an inexorable effect on something so immoveable? The massive boulder cracked because a seemingly inconsequential weed managed to get a roothold in some miniscule chink in its armor then time and persistence killed the great beast. The same happens with the divisiveness of man.
Ever wonder why when radical Muslims are not killing us they are killing each other over what seems to us to be indecipherable religious nuances? Does the logic of their all devoutly believing in the same God; yet still killing each other’s children over some trivial religious disagreement confuse you? Aren’t you thankful that our own culture is past feeding on itself? I used to think that there was no American correlation to the radical Muslim behavior and I’m sorry to say that I was completely wrong. The issue is not radical Muslim behavior; the issue is human behavior!
I have been involved with hunting, the shooting sports, and gun ownership for a very long time. At one time my passion even found me owning a couple archery stores where, for the first time I had to deal with the public. We catered to all the various archery pursuits and while I use archery as an example, the problem is universal to all the shooting and hunting sports.
On many occasions I had to break up disputes among customers who acted more like warring factions than fraternal participants in the sport of archery. Traditional longbow archer customers not only thought of the compound bow shooters as the great unwashed, but also felt that the recurve shooters where heretics for straying from the true path, and in turn the wheel-bow shooters thought the traditionalists were all relics. The 50% let-off shooters looked down on the 65% let-off shooters and everybody thought the 80% let-off shooters were simply sissies. These feuds were further exacerbated by organizations like Pope and Young who established that animals taken with 50% and 65% let-off bows could be entered into the record book, but not those taken with the 80% let-off bows. The manufacturers weighed in on the whole thing by making 80s almost exclusively. The whole argument revolved around what was and was not considered to be the definition of proper “BOWHUNTING.” These were fully grown men almost coming to blows over nuances. And the younger men and women were watching and taking sides; “You’re not a archer if you……”
To make matters worse, the problems repeatedly reached the print media. Specialty publications where full of the same things, “Be ware of the Dark Side.” “Our way is the only way to salvation”. We saw the traditionalists lobby legislatures trying to get special hunting seasons that would have precluded compound archery participation. Rifle, shotgun, and muzzleloader hunter groups all followed suit, each trying to carve their piece of the rock at the other’s expense.
The disparaging remarks and infighting eventually escalated between Cap and Ball muzzleloader people and the Inline muzzleloader group. We had disputes between the optical sight and iron sight folks and then between the traditional Cap and Ballers and the traditional Flintlock shooters for all the same reasons. We see it continue with nearly whole sectors of sports not supporting the others, shotgunners not supporting handgunners, and hunters not supporting riflemen. The list, sadly, goes on and on. Human nature promotes us to congregate with those who have similar interests then subdivides each specialty and nuance until everyone hates everyone. We must recognize this and consciously work to avoid it.
Think about it, there are tens of millions of us and combined we would be the greatest political force in this country, yet we fight amongst ourselves over nuance. We fractionalize and mitigate our own importance simply because it’s not enough for us to just not do what someone else does, we need to degrade and denounce it because we don’t do it. We need to mark our territory. We need to establish ourselves in the pecking order ahead of the next guy. And all the while we are doing it our enemies circle above us like vultures waiting for the weakest among us to fall out of step. They pick us, or in this case our rights, off one by one. Like the weed, they look for the beginnings of a crack, which we most likely started for them, and they make it wider, separating the smaller pieces over and over until there’s just sand left. We are doing this to ourselves. Our enemies have not the strength of numbers, the facts, nor the intelligence to defeat us, so we fight amongst ourselves and do the heavy lifting for them.
Jim’s words hurt sportsmen on many levels. Primarily, it pitted one congregation of the shooting sports against another. Nothing hurts more than the strike of a friend. The backlash was immediate and it was massive. The disciples of the black rifle took it personally. They were tired of being attacked by outsiders and would not stand for an attack from inside.
Jim’s comments exacerbated the rift between disciplines. I, for one, consider all shooters to be part of a sacred brotherhood. Whether it be hunting, sport, or defense, we are all of the same ilk. I fear that others who used to think the same way will now see hunters —and anyone else not of the same discipline — as different from the pack. Lastly, we will see Jim’s thoughts used against the entire shooting sport as his words are resounded and repeated by those working diligently to take all our rights away.
We often see those in the hunting, archery, and clay-shooting disciplines decry the rights of those involved in self-defense far more often than the reverse. While it may have happened, I have never heard of an owner of an AR-15 bemoaning the existence of hunting rifles.
The most ironic aspect of this is what it is that is truly protected by our Constitution. It’s time someone simply said the dirty little secret out loud. The bow hunting magazines won’t do it because they’re interested in bow hunting; the hunting magazines won’t take the position because they’re only interested in hunting. The shooting magazines don’t want to draw attention to the fact that there are thirty million of us with guns, so no one says it. This isn’t about hunting or shooting, it’s about the right to “keep and bear arms”. PERIOD!
That’s all it is and we need to realize that or it’s not going to matter if you think that shotguns are enough, or that bows are the right way, or that assault weapons, or IPSC are your things, because if we can’t get it through our collective heads that we need to be one voice first and foremost, if we can’t rally around “One for all and all for one” it’s not a mater of if we lose, we’re just marking time until we lose.
After the Second World War a German reverend was asked why the people hadn’t simply stood up to the Nazis in the beginning. He said, “well first they came for the socialists, but we weren’t socialists, so we said nothing, and then they came for the gypsies, but we weren’t gypsies, so we said nothing. Then they came for the Jews, but we weren’t Jews, so we said nothing. “And after a long litany he said “and when they finally came for us there was no one left to say anything.”
They will come for our shotgun and hunting rifle just as they have come for handguns and so-called assault weapons. The only way to end the tyranny against our rights is for all members of the shooting sports to work together as one. Clay shooters must protect the right to self-defense as much as bow hunters must protect the rights of target shooters. Divisiveness will only allow the weed of the anti-gunners to destroy the rock of our rights.
The thing that no one wants to say is this; our founders gave us the right to keep and bear arms for two reasons only; the first is implicit in the second. The first is that we be able to protect and defend our loved ones, our property and ourselves. The second is that we have the ability and the right to overthrow, that’s right, revolt against our own government if it becomes unresponsive to, or abusive of the needs and rights of the People. Period!
They meant that we should have weapons capable of fighting against those supplied to an army by that unresponsive government. They did not guarantee a right to hunt, to shoot clay pigeons, or bow hunt. Those things were implied by “to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”.
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
You will notice that only the words State and People are capitalized. Obviously these words and their connotation were of great import to the congress. Clearly the signers wanted there to be no ambiguity about the importance of the People and their right to bear arms.
This capitalization was not a mistake or a typo. You may have doubts, but consider that 220 years ago, 40 dedicated and educated men, after fully ten years of thought and deliberation took the time to review each individual word in our Constitution and were unanimously agreed to each one used in the text of the most specific and important democratic document ever written. For anyone to claim that they meant anything other than what they said they meant is foolish. These were learned and deliberate men.
I don’t duck hunt. I did, but I don’t anymore, but you can. I’m into tonnage now. Yep trophies, another thing Jim Zumbo is now against, but you hunt what and how you want with what you want and so will I. I own several duck guns and several field guns, however I haven’t shot at a pheasant for years and fully expect not to for years, but you go ahead. I don’t shoot trap, or skeet, or sporting clays or even whitetail anymore, but I’m glad that millions do. All I want to do is hunt Africa now and while I could, if I were shortsighted or overly opinionated, make a great case that ten grand for a shotgun to shoot clay is ridiculous, I’d have to then deal with my building several $5,000 hunting rifles each year that I may never use more than once, or face the fact that I also like owning and building ARs and military weapons. It’s my right, yours too, but you do what makes you happy and so will I!
I, by the rights given to me by some very smart men, have the right to voice my positive or negative opinion about the guns you own or how you pursue your little piece of the gifts our second amendment allows, but I must remember to remember that whatever you shoot or don’t shoot is your right and I would be the first one out the door with mine to protect yours. And while Jim and many like him may have forgotten that, please don’t you forget it!
-- Gary Cananzey
Gary Cananzey has hunted large and small game across most of North American and is now focused on hunting Africa. He is an avid gun collector, precision rifle shooter, handgunner, and managing partner of American Hunting Albums, a manufacturer of photo storage products for hunters.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Suggestions wanted!!
If you have a question, or have a suggestion for a topic, this thread is the place to let me know!
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