One of America's most venerable gun journalists has been exiled from the industry because of pressure from
firearms advertisers, he claims.
Dick Metcalf has been banished - or, as Phil Robertson's defenders might say, his free speech rights have been
violated.
Metcalf was fired from Guns & Ammo after he questioned gun rights orthodoxy, and now no one in the community will touch him. No magazine will publish him and his TV
show has been canned.
"I've been vanished, disappeared," said Metcalf, 67, to the New York Times. His career was ended by a single column questioning whether gun rights should be unlimited, in
which he wrote that "all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be." Those
words ended Metcalf's career after decades of writing for Guns & Ammo and other gun magazines.
Metcalf says that he was fired because of pressure from gun advertisers, and his claim is supported by the words of another editor at Guns & Ammo. Senior editor Garry James told the Times that "advertisers obviously always have power, and you always feel some pressure," and admitted that he took advertiser views into account as well as readers' reaction to Metcalf's column.
Metcalf claims his editor told him that two major gun manufacturers had said "in no uncertain terms" that they
would pull their business if he continued to work there. He
was fired the same day.
Ruger, another firearms company that advertises in Guns & Ammo, admitted to the Times that the magazine had called to discuss Metcalf's column, suggesting that
advertisers are consulted about editorial content in the magazine.
However, the Ruger spokesman says that the decision to terminate Metcalf had been made before the call, and Ruger had no direct role in it.
Metcalf is far from the first gun writers to be fired for offending advertisers. The Times gives two other examples:
In 2012, Jerry Tsai, the editor of Recoil magazine, wrote that the Heckler & Koch MP7A1 gun, designed for law enforcement, was "unavailable to
civilians and for good reason.
"He was pressured to step down, and despite apologizing, has not written
since. In 2007, Jim Zumbo, by then the author of 23 hunting books, wrote a blog post for Outdoor Life's
website suggesting that military-style rifles were "terrorist" weapons, best avoided by hunters.
His writing, television and endorsement deals were quickly put on hiatus.
Other editors at Guns & Ammo revealed that reviews are written in "in close consultation with manufacturers," and that instead of publishing a negative review they will send feedback to the gunmaker so they can improve the gun before the review is published. In other words, they withhold information from readers in the service of gun
manufacturers.
Meanwhile Metcalf is still shocked that a "Second Amendment fundamentalist" like himself, who always keeps a revolver to hand, has been banished from the gun rights community.
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