What a shame for the guy to have an epiphany to take a principled stand against assault weapons and then come crawling back on his hands and knees to the gun lobby. Talk about getting blown right out of the water. Zumbo, you did something courageous but all you've proven is that you're a sniveling loser like all the other assault weapons freaks out there.

Like we care about the fine details of the best gun for vaporizing coyotes or the differences between hunters and shooters. Only the gunnuts care about that stuff.

The story to the rest of us is the massive overreaction to this lifelong gunnut's brief heresy.

Torquemada never acted so swiftly, perhaps because he was dangerous but not so well armed.

This is one of the most intelligent articles on firearms and hunting I have read in a long time. I have hunted for years, and have long recognized that the bulldozer and land development is the greatest killer of wildlife there is.

Thank you for the interesting read. Sorry to hear Zumbo caved - I like to think that the outdoors type is a little more resolute in his convictions. I hunt deer with a bolt-action Interarms Mark X 30.06 rifle - to use an AK or CAR-15 seems just wrong. It would be like driving nails with the blunt edge of a hatchet: you could do it; it would work fine; but why would you want to?

All of this goes back to that Stockton schoolyard, and that maniac with an AK-47. The fact that a gun LOOKS scary does not MAKE IT scary. A Kalashnikov firing 6.56 or an M-16 firing 7.62 ammunition will do LESS damage than a standard, scoped 30-.06 hunting rifle. This was ably demonstrated waaaay back in '86 by a taciturn bald man who appeared on a variety of TV news shows. First he fired an AK-47 through a watermelon. A nice, round hole appeared, along with a small crack in its side. Then he fired at it with a 30-.06.

The entire melon exploded like a bomb. There is a reason why the M-1 Garand, basically a semi-auto, combat version of a 30-.06, was considered the best rifle used in WWII.

Purists will note that a bolt action rifle is always better for hunting because there is less recoil than one experiences with a semi-automatic rifle. That's because when fired the semi-auto has to expel the empty casing while popping another round into the chamber, causing a jolt up and to the right. But an excellent marksman can compensate, and easily take down prey. Again, purists will point out that it's less sporting to have the ability to pop away at prey from a 20-round clip. To each their own.

While I do not condone the pogrom unleashed on Mr. Zumbo, he did write something extremely dumb. There are plenty of gun manufacturers - Remington most prominent among them - who in fact manufacture scoped, 30-.06 hunting rifles that are also semi-automatic. Some are clip-fed, others have to be loaded from above or below the breech. But they are semi-automatic just the same. I'm very surprised he didn't know that.

Last but not least, and for the record, I am a Left-Progressive Chomskyite, and I support gun ownership and the 2nd Amendment for PRECISELY those reasons. Frightened liberals who go on and on about "gun nuts" sometimes make me want to puke.

It grants the right to protect your family against invaders - a well regulated militia. Militias carry assault rifles - so constitutionally speaking, Zumbo was wrong, and the NRA set was right.

I come from northern Manitoba and its hunting country up here. Everyone I know hunts, and people go out for jumpers, elk, moose, squirrel, rabbit, waterfowl, and whatever. We have a hunting tradition that stretches back to the first whites and metis who came here centuries ago, and stretches further back thousands of years to the aboriginal peoples who lived, hunted, fished and trapped in this region.

I'll tell you this: Anyone who takes modern military weapons out on a hunting expedition is nothing but an asshole and he deserves nothing but contempt. That's not an opinion, that's just a fact.

The difference between leprosy and gun ownership is that leprosy is not communicable, is not fatal and for the most part lepers are nice people.

So gun owners are "nuts". We're "lepers" and owning guns is "fatal". It's really amazing just how rational, tolerant and accepting of differences of opinions we Progressives are. The respect some here demonstrate for diversity and the facts and the way they avoid stereotyping and bigotry is worthy of the far reaches of the Republican Party or the American Family Association talking about gays and lesbians.

The simple truth is, evil looking guns are no more dangerous than any other. Less, in fact. But there's snobbery and feelings of superiority within the community of gun owners. Zumbo simply represents one extreme - the bolt action snobs who look down on pistol and revolver owners and especially on people who use self-loading rather than bolt-fed rifles. He shot off his mouth with considerably less accuracy than he does his firearms and managed to alienate an huge segment of his audience. So he ticked off the advertisers and sponsors and was dropped. Simple enough, and he was too stupid to realize it until the money really did stop coming in.

Now, as for us "lepers", "nuts" and "terrorists" I would suggest some here brush up against actual facts rather than acting like Klansmen talking about nigras. The evil black plastic guns called "assault weapons" - a completely meaningless term specifically politically invented to confuse cosmetics with function - aren't particularly terrifying or deadly. They are used in such a vanishingly small fraction of armed crimes that the NIJ's response has been "Why are we even bothering to count them?"

And regular legal gun owners, the ones who aren't felons, mentally incompetent or otherwise disqualified, are less likely than the general population to commit violent crimes. There really is no doubt about it. One may argue about exactly what sorts of regulation is appropriate. Given the venom and slander evident in this forum it's not surprising that most of the people in the gun-owning 1/3 of all American households do not believe they will get any kind of fair hearing.

According to former President Clinton and former Speaker Tom Foley the passage of the Assault Weapons Ban was directly responsible for the loss of the the legislature to the Republicans. Gun owners who would otherwise have continued to vote for the Democrats felt that their civil liberties were in jeopardy. So they fell into the clutches of the GOP. It will be another generation before their children have a chance of returning. Those votes will be lost forever if the unreasoning hatred of law-abiding gun owners continues on our side. People like you, personally, are responsible for George W. Bush, Dennis Hastert, Tom De Lay and John Ashcroft. It really is as simple as that. It's the slander, bigotry and unreasoning prejudice from our side that put them in power.