'Assault rifles' have a legal and useful place in hunting

http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/stories/index.ssf?/base/sports/1186784724117830.xml&coll=7

'Assault rifles' have a legal and useful place in hunting

Sunday, August 12, 2007

I bought a new (for me, anyway) rifle this past week.

It's black. It has a bipod on the stock, a black banana clip that looks like

a handle, a scope with a lot of knobs and a shiny metal muzzle on the

special oversized barrel.

It looks a lot like an assault weapon.

It is a Ruger 10/22, one of the most accurate and most popular

sport/plinking rifles produced.

I got it, in part, for my granddaughter, who's ready to graduate from a

pellet rifle.

She's no terrorist, and neither am I.

Nor, as many of you have repeatedly pointed out in somewhat less than

complimentary terms, am I a (pick one):

Liberal-bunny/tree-hugging-firearm-wannabe.

Gun-toting, bloodthirsty, gratuitous-violence-seeking hunting-maggot.

Nope, I'm simply someone who loves to hunt, uses firearms as tools (OK, and

for home self-defense these days) and recognizes the Second Amendment comes

after the First.

It's hard to forget the firearms industry's feeding frenzy in February when

Jim Zumbo sacrificed more than 30 years as the hunting editor of Outdoor

Life by writing about assault weapons on his Internet blog after a beer over

the campfire:

"I call them 'assault' rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe

I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting

fraternity. I'll go so far as to call them 'terrorist' rifles. . . . As

hunters, we don't need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of

these weapons.

"To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let's

divorce ourselves from them."

Some of the public -- some via e-mail within cyberseconds -- divorced

themselves from Zumbo, including a disgustingly hypocritical Outdoor Life

and National Rifle Association, both of which shot him down in flames in the

very same breath with which they piously declared his right to speak his

mind.

Others divorced themselves from Outdoor Life, the NRA and all the others

that cut and ran.

Many of you supported him and some chided me for not saying the same thing a

long time ago.

After a long look -- and without the field trips I'd hoped to take with some

who invited me along for a firsthand look at modified weapons -- I have to

agree Zumbo was wrong.

But not because of what he said.

More because of what he didn't realize.

We all wish there weren't assault weapons afield during hunting seasons --

or perhaps any other season.

But hearken to the middle ages of Europe. At the turn of the 16th century,

Leonardo da Vinci (who also first envisioned metal tanks, submarines and

machine guns) invented a wheel-lock firing mechanism so revolutionary it was

declared an assault weapon by a Germanic emperor who bought a lot of them

for his army, then banned private ownership.

That might have been a precursor of sorts to gun control, but more important

ultimately led to improved hunting weapons.

Most modern sporting firearms are rooted in military applications.

The fact is, as one reader pointed out, one of the newest, the AR-15, when

reduced to a five-round magazine and semi-automatic

(pull-the-trigger-each-time), and with a scope mounted above the barrel, is

an uncommonly steady hunting weapon.

The choice to use one (for example, my granddaughter's target practice with

my new Ruger) doesn't brand him or her.

It remains a free country, and if someone wants to carry that message into

the woods, the First Amendment allows the statement and the Second allows

the shot.

Zumbo, by the way, is back on The Outdoor Channel, minus his job with

Outdoor Life and most of the cut-and-run sponsors. He's had some preliminary

discussions with Remington Firearms about resurrecting their bond.

"He's kind of relieved about not having those (magazine) deadlines all the

time," said his wife, Madonna, from their log home outside Cody, Wyo.

Zumbo is in Africa, taking a wounded Iraq War veteran hunting, packing

donated clothing (Safari Club International) into villages and filming the

African story -- all worthwhile projects to which his former sponsors should

be paying much more attention than the self-righteous zealots among their

subscribers and members.

"Zum learned a lot and met a lot of very nice people," Madonna said. "I

think the anonymity of the Internet allows the worst of people's

personalities to come out."