I'm obviously in the minority, and while not disparaging the reasoning behind the idea, Zumbo at this point going through a carbine school & writing up his impressions is a complete yawner to me.
It won't have any beneficial effect on the anti-gunners, who'll merely claim anything he now does is just a cave-in to pressure, I don't believe it'll convince any of the hunting crowd that the black guns are OK today because "If Jim Zumbo says so, then by golly it must be true", and I couldn't care less about his brand new & shiny (emphasis on shiny) religious conversion.
No bitterness there over what he did, just a belief that nothing he does now will make any real difference in the overall picture.
The Brady Bunch already has their quotes from him to use for maximum mileage, no amount of AR15 hunting trips with Nugent, or anybody else, will undo that. He may gain some forgiveness from AR owners in actually touching one of the evil guns on a hunt, and he may get an eye-opener regarding their capabilities for defensive use, but in the final analysis it does all boil down to being just a response to pressure, and even if he does grudgingly admit that the guns do maybe have some small degree of hunting utility, he's still viewing their validity through the filter of HUNTING. I could be wrong, but I don't see that putting him through a class will do much more than allow him to see how efficient the gun is in non-hunting scenarios, and I seriously doubt that will change his attitude about the "terrorist guns". Showing him, essentially, how efficiently it can kill people (whether in justifiable circumstances or not) is unlikely, in my opinion, to make them any more acceptable in his eyes when he already obviously views them as only suitable for terrorists and only appropriate for killing people.
His mentality, clearly demonstrated, is that he has no use for a defensive rifle, and even if he admits the AR can be hunted with, he still doesn't see ownership for either recreational or legitimate self-protection as acceptable. I'm not convinced that teaching him how well ARs work in those roles will alter his viewpoint on them.
He also has yet to apologize (as far as anything I've seen, anyway) for his comments labeling the guns as terrorist weapons, and by extension, owners of them as terrorists.
I see people on various gun forums saying that, "Golly, if he goes hunting with the Nuge, it's all better again", and I don't mean to be offensive in saying this- but, no, it's not all better again. It really changes nothing significantly.
I'm not among those who demand blood from Zumbo, but I'm also not among those who feel that he has any real relevance anymore.
Denis
