It has been removed from Guns & Ammo magazine, where his widely read column once ran on the back page. He no longer stars on a popular television show about firearms. Gun companies have stopped flying him around the world and sending him the latest weapons to review.

BARRY, Ill. — The byline of Dick Metcalf, one of the country’s preeminent gun journalists, has vanished.

“The fact is,” wrote Metcalf, who has taught history at Cornell and Yale, “all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.”


The backlash was swift, and fierce. Readers threatened to cancel their subscriptions. Death threats poured in by e-mail. His television program was pulled from the air.

Just days after the column appeared, Metcalf said, his editor called to tell him that two major gun manufacturers had said “in no uncertain terms” that they could no longer do business with InterMedia Outdoors, the company that publishes Guns & Ammo and co-produces his TV show, if he continued to work there. He was let go immediately.

“I’ve been vanished, disappeared,” Metcalf, 67, said in an interview in December on his gun range here, about 100 miles north of St. Louis. “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.

His experience sheds light on the close-knit world of gun journalism, where editors and reporters say there is little room for nuance in the debate on gun laws. Moderate voices that might broaden the discussion from within are silenced.

When writers stray from the party line promoting an absolutist view of an unfettered right to bear arms, their publications — often under pressure from advertisers — excommunicate them.


“We are locked in a struggle with powerful forces in this country who will do anything to destroy the Second Amendment,” said Richard Venola, a former editor of Guns & Ammo. “The time for ceding some rational points is gone.”

There have been other cases like Metcalf’s.

In 2012, Jerry Tsai, the editor of Recoil magazine, wrote that the Heckler & Koch MP7A1 gun, with ammunition designed in part to pierce body armor, 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 endorsements were put on hiatus.

Garry James, a senior editor at Guns & Ammo, said in a phone interview several weeks ago that its readers were the magazine’s main concern and its editorial independence was not at risk.

But, he added, “advertisers obviously always have power, and you always feel some pressure.”

Kevin B. Reid Sr., general counsel for Ruger, a major advertiser with InterMedia, said the company had a conference call with the publishing company to discuss the column, but denied Ruger pressured InterMedia to fire Metcalf. Remington Arms Co. did not respond to a request for comment.