Gresham wants to keep his radio show

After initially defending dumb ass Fudd Jim Zumbo on his radio show Tom Gresham reconsidered and posted some comments on his website which demonstrate that he "gets it".

What I found most interesting were his concluding remarks:

We can take away from this experience several observations.

The first is that this attitude of "just let them take those ugly, black guns" is common among hunters and competitive shooters. Anyone with that attitude is a fool. Sit down with a hunter from England or Australia, hear him tell the story of what happened there, and watch the tears well up in his eyes when he says they never thought the government would take away their hunting guns. To gun banners, there is no such thing as a good gun. They want them all. When Tom Diaz, of the Violence Policy Center, was on Gun Talk, I forced him to admit that he would like to ban all guns. What about the police, I asked. Once we get all the other guns, he said, the police won't need their guns, either.

A ban on black guns, or "Saturday Night Specials," or 50-caliber rifles, is a ban on all our guns. There is no such thing as a bad gun or a good gun. We can't throw babies off the back of the sled, thinking it will keep the wolves away from us.

The next thing we learn from this is that the world has just changed. This entire episode took place inside of 36 hours, on a weekend -- a three-day weekend for President's Day. It happened...and this is important...entirely on the internet. The original posting was on the net, the reaction was on the net, the emails demanding that companies break off with Zumbo were on the net, and the reactions from the companies were all on their web sites. This was completely an internet event. It was a nuclear explosion, with tens of thousands of messages posted, spanning all the firearms-related web sites.

How often over the last 30 years, as I fought for gun rights, traveled to Washington, DC, wrote about gun rights, spoke at the Gun Rights Policy Conference, and for the last 14 years, broadcasted about gun rights on the radio, have I lamented the inability to get gun owners motivated to protect their own rights? This powerful example shows that it can be done.
Now, the real question is whether we can generate that kind of response when we need to defeat a gun ban. Can we melt down mail servers of elected representatives the way gun owners hammered the servers at various companies? I don't know.

What I do know is that we are facing more calls for gun bans and restrictions on our gun rights over the next few years than we have seen in the last 40 years. Someone on the side of gun rights needs to develop a way to replicate this . . . this "Zumbo Effect" . . . to beat back the assault which has already started.

We must find a way to "Zumbo" our attackers in Congress, in the state houses, and wherever they assault our rights.

In one sense we already "Zumbo" our political enemies. The renewed efforts to bring back the Clinton gun ban will go nowhere because the average Democrat has internalized the fact that supporting gun control is a losing strategy. Political operators also remember the fate of Bill Bennett who earned the ire of the firearms community by urging George H W Bush to ban the importation of "assault rifles" when he was drug czar.

The fact is that gun owners are pretty good at keeping laws that we don't want to pass from passing. We are not so good at getting laws that we don't like repealed, but repealing bad laws is exceedingly difficult. The fact is that the only reason that the Clinton "assault rifle" ban is no more is that it contained a sunset provision and all congress had to do to kill the law was nothing.

The fact that the Second Amendment community was able to eradicate the career of dumb ass Fudd Jim Zumbo over the span of a long weekend is due to one thing. The firearms manufacturing and hunting equipment industries are small and dependant upon a relatively fixed customer base. When that base rose up in great numbers the businesses felt that they had no economic choice but to sever their ties with Mr. Zumbo.

The reason that gun owners will never have the ability to accomplish anything so spectacular in the political field is that firearms owners represent only a fraction of the total population. Firearms enthusiasts make up almost 100% of Remington's customer base so we exercise enormous power over Remington's actions. However there are not very many gun owners in Charles Schumer's congressional district so their opinions matter very little to him.

The best and most effective thing we can do is register and vote, keep ourselves informed, speak out whenever the opportunity presents itself and cultivate long memories. We have made great progress in convincing politicians that while the wheels of gun owner's justice sometimes grind exceedingly slowly they also grind exceedingly fine.