Dick Metcalf Archives -

Cry Me A River

Dick Metcalf, formerly of Guns & Ammo magazine, was fired because he tried to argue that gun control was OK constitutionally because the Second Amendment includes the words “well-regulated”. In other words, Metcalf was fired for stupidity. I shed no tears over that.

Yesterday, the New York Times, no friend of gun rights or gun owners, decided that Mr. Metcalf would make a great poster boy to show how authoritarian and how close-minded we are. Moreover, it looks like Mr. Metcalf cooperated fully with the Time’s reporter.

This is a war. You do not give aid and comfort to the enemy. Mr. Metcalf did that with his G&A editorial and this is what he is doing now.

In the article that appeared online yesterday and on the front page of the print edition today, Metcalf said:

“I’ve been vanished, disappeared,” Mr. Metcalf, 67, said in an interview last month on his gun range here, about 100 miles north of St. Louis, surrounded by snow-blanketed fields and towering grain elevators. “Now you see him. Now you don’t.”

He is unsure of his next move, but fears he has become a pariah in the gun industry, to which, he said, he has devoted nearly his entire adult life.

While being the subject of front-page profile in the Times may impress his former colleagues at Yale and Cornell, it won’t help him within the gun culture. If anything, it completes his estrangement from those of us in the gun culture.

I don’t feel sorry for Mr. Metcalf. He has made his bed and now he has to sleep in it. Now if he’d just realize it.

Metcalf Responds

The mainstream media has now officially taken notice of the Guns & Ammo/Metcalf controversy. The Complementary Spouse was watching ABC’s ~~Gun~~ Good Morning America a few minutes ago and saw a news scroll that read “Editor of Guns & Ammo Magazine Resigns After Publishing Column Pushing For Gun Control”. The controversy has also caught the eye of the New York Times, The Atlantic, HuffPo, New York Magazine, CNN, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Media Matters for America. Their articles are full of tut-tutting about the intolerance of gun owners for any dissent. As Miguel points out, Metcalf’s article made him the “new darling of the anti gun groups.”

Jim Shepherd, publisher of The Outdoor Wire, in a rather classy move asked Dick Metcalf to respond. He did and Jim has published his response. I will leave it to you to read rather than summarizing it.

After reading his response I’m still not clear on what Metcalf hoped to accomplish with his original column. As to why he wrote it, I’m voting for Stockholm Syndrome.

UPDATE: The Metcalf response has drawn some equally strong counter-responses.

Bitter at Shall Not Be Infringed does an excellent job at taking it apart bit by bit.

It’s as if he doesn’t even comprehend that those “voices” are the very customers and readers of Guns & Ammo and purchasers of the firearms products advertised in the pages. Not everyone may be a subscriber, but they are all part of the target market.

The industry is shifting. The markets are adapting. The audience, as a whole, is more sophisticated. I think the evidence suggests that it’s Metcalf who isn’t ready to have a serious discussion on these topics, not his audience.

Michael Bane terms it lame.

This is not, as Bitter so lucidly notes, a “free speech” issue. Let me go a step farther than that…as I noted in my earlier post, we have been having a “dialog” about the role of firearms in American society at least as long as I’ve been alive. IMHO, the “dialog” ended when the war began.

Let me say this again…we are at war with a segment of society whose sole goal is total civilian disarmament. We are not in a dialog. We are not in a debate. We are not in a healthy give-and-take in the Cornell University academic lounge. The primary weapon used by our blood enemies is the Big Lie.

Lest it be forgotten, Michael was in the front lines of this war in Colorado. He has seen the Big Lie used against those of us who believe in freedom time and time again.

Bob Owens at Bearing Arms notes that Metcalf’s response seems more incoherent than his original column.