Putz and the case of Jim Zumbo.

(Pictured: leftwing anti-gun rights activist Jim Zumbo posing with gun control advocate)

In case you didn't know, Jim Zumbo is a famous gun enthusiast who had his own hunting show, wrote for hunting magazines, and who for better than 40 years, had been an advocate for the gun lobby.

Not anymore.

Zumbo's fame, however, has turned to black-bordered infamy within America's gun culture -- and his multimedia success has come undone. It all happened in the past week, after he publicly criticized the use of military-style assault rifles by hunters, especially those gunning for prairie dogs.

"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. The Feb. 16 posting has since been taken down. "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."

Zumbo said what critics of assault rifles have said for years. No one needs an assault rifle. So the NRA whacked him. His show's cancelled. His career of five decades, over. That's what happens when you deviate even slightly from the party line in extremist organizations. You're purged.

So it's telling that all Putz can muster about the Jim Zumbo incident is to quote John Derbyshire.

I HAVEN'T WRITTEN MUCH ABOUT THE ZUMBO AFFAIR, and honestly I think the response was a bit of overkill. But here's a good observation:

The POLITICAL message here is the tremendous passion & solidarity of gun enthusiasts. (Plus, of course, as the above writer stresses, the power of the Internet.) We've all been ruminating on the need for Rudy Giuliani to do some hard thinking & plain talking about those social issues on which he is too liberal for a lot of Republicans: abortion, homosexual unions, gun rights. It may be that the greatest of these is gun rights. We folk at NRO being mainly a bunch of flabby Metrocons, perhaps we tend to underestimate this issue. Let's hope Rudy doesn't.

So far, I think that he does.

Three years ago, Putz was worried that Bush's stance on assault rifles would cost him the 2004 election, he's strongly opposed to gun control measures of any kind, and he takes perverse pleasure of calling gun rights "civil rights." He even trotted out the old, "guns don't kill people, people kill people" defense in response to a Washington Monthly piece that documented quite accurately how GOP gun policies enabled the DC Sniper to obtain his .223 semiautomatic. In short, he's a party-line NRA mouthpiece.

It's a shame Zumbo has apologized for his comment -- he was 100% correct. Giuliani was mayor of a city with a population greater than Putz's entire state. Under his policies, violent crime in NYC dropped. And yet Putz wants him to cow tow to the NRA's extremist party line on assault weapons -- otherwise, to Putz, that makes him an unacceptable candidate.

Just another day for the reasonable nonpartisan moderate.