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.

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.

Okay, for the record, I have never fired a genuine firearm, and I gave away the pistol my dad gave me for "self defense." I gave it away because, when I was robbed and tied up, I realized that if the thieves found my pistol it would be used on me. However, I have a brother who owns many firearms, and hunts and uses them responsibly. Now that this stuff is cleared...

The NRA has been using Tom Wolfe's famous "double tracking" for decades; saying two things simultaneously to signify two different things. Yes, they have promoted responsible firearm use, hunting conservation and all that. But at the same time, they've promoted how firearms are used in self-defense against criminals and home invaders. There's very little deer hunted in the streets of Miami...so guess for what purpose most of those guns are sold.

They've been playing both factions, obviously trying to get "all gun owners" under their wing. But that also means that the modest people who hunt game for food, sport or whatever are associated with the drive-by shooters and the NFL players who feel it necessary to pack heat when they party. Their only mutual factor is that they're firearm owners, but that's a tie that no gun owners I've ever heard of has tried to break.

As a result, those hunters are upset over any kind of gun control, seeing a domino theory. They imagine themselves as being under a Nazi regime. "First they took away our automatic machine guns, and I didn't complain, because I can't afford one...and then they took the Uzis from the gangbangers, and I didn't protest, because I'm not black..." And then the final verse: "And then they came for my handgun, and there was nobody to help me blow away the bastards of the Trilateral Commission."

It's a politics of fear that has been going on longer, and more successfully, than that generated after September 11. But politics run on fear can start eating its own. Mr. Zumbo is a good example - he didn't keep to the True Faith that insists on the purity of the bullet, no matter for what it is used.

(It goes without saying that the NRA is speaking for the people who advertise heavily in its magazine and support it, the firearm industry. Have they ever said anything against Remington or Smith & Wesson?)

And as for the article...it did contain technical information that anyone really concerned about firearms should know. The fact that a simple, non-automatic rifle has a longer range and a more devastating impact than the machine pistols everyone is drooling after indicates the author is operating out of actual knowlege, not mythology - and there's myth-making on behalf of the gun lobby and the anti-gun lobby alike. (Curious that one poster suggested that this is knowledge that nobody should ever want to know, that it should be banned from human existence. I wonder if he/she feels the same about sex education.)