I read a story yesterday that encapsulated a lot of what I despise about gun culture in modern America.

Jim Zumbo, a famous outdoorsman/hunter/gun advocate, has been vilified and basically sent into hiding after daring to suggest, in a blog post while on a hunt in Wyoming, that assault rifles have no place in the hunting community:

"Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity," Zumbo wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life Web site. "As hunters, we don't need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them ... I'll go so far as to call them 'terrorist' rifles."

As a result of expressing his personal opinions, this man has now lost his position with Outdoor Life magazine, the Outdoor Channel, and his corporate sponsorships. He's been publicly berated by the NRA and thousands of assault-rifle owners.

Zumbo is a 40-year member of the NRA, and has long been a public advocate for the organization and the gun-ownership rights it champions. It's obvious to anyone with a shred of intelligence that all he's saying is that these weapons made for war are grotesquely out of place in what should be a pursuit that's based on respect, dignity, and tradition. Further, he seems to be cautioning that gun owners as a group risk being lumped in with terrorists if they use the same weapons that terrorists use.

It's a pretty simple and obviously valid point. An example he singled out was the use of assault rifles when hunting prairie dogs. Doing that is comparable to a teenager playing a gory first-person video game, except unlike those video games which are so widely pilloried in society, this is actual violence committed against helpless creatures for sport and perverted amusement.

Zumbo was trying to draw the line between this unsportsmanlike behavior and the nobler hunting tradition in which hunters observe restraint and respect for their environment and their quarry. He was pointing out how the presence of weapons created to kill humans in the desperate setting of war--and indeed, these very same rifles are being used to kill our soldiers in Iraq as we speak--is not appropriate in a hunting setting.

And for this, his livelihood has been decimated, his character destroyed by his supposed friends and supporters. The NRA has gone a step further by turning his character assassination into something comparable to a mob hit, 'sending a message' over his figurative corpse:

The NRA--a well-financed gun lobby that for decades has fought attempts to regulate assault weapons--noted that the new Congress should pay careful attention to the outdoors writer's fate.

"Our folks fully understand that their rights are at stake," the NRA statement said. It warned that the "grassroots" passion that brought down Zumbo shows that millions of people would "resist with an immense singular political will any attempts to create a new ban on semi-automatic firearms."

All very noble-sounding, but Jim Zumbo isn't a politician. He's a gun advocate who dared to speak a warning to his friends, who dared have an opinion about the proper, dignified use of guns. And for this, all that he's worked for has been stripped from him.

And so it becomes clear, once again, that guns don't make us free. We see from this case, as with so many others, that the only real power of guns is fear. The same power that creates fear in anyone a gun is directed at also poisons the gun owner with fear, paranoia, and eroding character.

Like any other power, it can be used responsibly. My father is a member of possibly the last generation of dignified hunters in this country--he owns several hunting rifles, used to be an avid hunter, and is a lifelong conservationist. That's the type of gun ownership that I respect--one based in moderation, dignity, and a tradition informed with humility. What the NRA has sown in modern America, however, is nothing short of fanaticism, a distorted intolerance and hatred that is based in an irrational fear.

By continuing along this fanatical path, groups like the NRA are starting to undermine their own cause. They're showing that all our other freedoms are meaningless and can be extinguished at will in the pursuit of being able to own and use any type of weapon in any context, no questions asked. But without the context of our other freedoms and a higher, noble purpose, gun ownership becomes a perverse, thuggish, slavish addiction to power and unquestioned behavior. And as any theologian or psychologist will tell you, that will produce monsters.

In fact, I don't think it's a stretch to say that the type of behavior demonstrated by Zumbo's attackers is representative of a larger sickening of the American character that is responsible for the disgust and fear with which our country is widely viewed around the world. Increasingly, as a culture we seem to want to be able to do whatever we want, so matter how destructive or consumptive, and not be questioned or resisted in any way. It's like a reversion to a childish state, in which we have transcended any notion of not being able to have everything what we want, however grotesque.

No matter how much the NRA and its more fanatical members want to believe it, there's no such thing as freedom without limits. The limits to our freedom, especially those which we impose on ourselves, are the source of our nobility and higher purpose as a country and as individuals. Freedom without any limits is, by definition, anarchy, and a perversion of the ideals of this country.

Labels: Culture