Dick Metcalf is an ordinary unemployed American citizen.

I started shooting at age five. By the time I turned 12, my parents gave me an NRA Life Membership. I’ve studied, written and taught about firearms law and the Bill of Rights since the 1960s, helping to enact concealed-carry laws in states across the country and authoring numerous other pieces of pro-firearms legislation. I’m a competitive shooter who’s hunted on five continents, and I founded a 150-acre shooting park in my home state of Illinois. All told, I’ve written more than 1,700 articles for firearms publications over the last four decades, as well as hosting and producing several firearms television programs.

Yet today I am labeled a “gun control collaborator,” a “Bloomberg supporter” and a “modern-day Benedict Arnold”—not to mention a “decrepit, mentally defunct self-important old fart.” And on Nov. 6, 2013, my 37-year career as a firearms journalist came to an abrupt end.


Why? Because I wrote an 800-word column for Guns & Ammo magazine exploring the distinction between regulation and infringement as it applies to constitutional rights. As discussions of the Second Amendment go, the column was innocuous. I did not call for any new regulations, but merely noted the Second Amendment was already regulated and that such regulations had been validated even in recent Supreme Court and federal appeals court rulings affirming an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. “Way too many gun owners seem to believe any regulation of the right to keep and bear arms is an infringement,” I wrote. “The fact is, all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.”

Other heresies on my part? I wrote that I personally had no problem with state laws requiring training for those seeking licenses to carry a concealed weapon and that I did not consider training requirements in and of themselves to be an infringement on my rights (though I’d like it to be good training). I mentioned the 16-hour training mandate in Illinois’s recently enacted concealed-carry statute and said that in spite of the time it requires, I much preferred to carry a firearm for defense legally than carry one illegally and risk prison. What I did not go so far as to say (though I now wish I had) was that compared to the previous Illinois law completely banning concealed carry, I viewed the new law not as an infringement but as a liberation. A first step.

The backlash from Second Amendment Fundamentalists—and I used to think I was one of them—was immediate. Outraged emails and web posts poured into Guns & Ammo’s website, as well as many independent firearms forums, all demanding my head. Firearms manufacturers received threats of boycotts if they continued to advertise in Guns & Ammo or sponsor TV shows with which I was associated. I was lambasted for my “patently absurd misreading of the Constitution” and my ignorance of what the language of the Second Amendment really meant. The most succinct messages took the form of, “You’re a bad person and I hope you die and go to Hell,” and the eloquent, “Someone should regulate your mouth!”

Someone did. Under pressure from advertisers, it took Guns & Ammo’s parent company, Intermedia Outdoors—a conglomerate that owns more than 40 shooting and hunting magazines and produces nearly 20 television programs—just three business days to inform me that my association with all InterMedia publications and the Sportsman Channel TV programs I was producing and co-hosting was terminated. At the same time, IMO’s vice president/editorial director, Jim Bequette, was removed from his position as editor of Guns & Ammo, where he had assigned and approved the column. He retains his larger role in the company.

Metcalf (right) with Jim Bequette, the man who terminated his contract and who had been best man at his wedding. | Photo courtesy of the author

For some commenters, the ax wasn’t enough. “He got off lucky,” wrote one. “Tar, feathers, a fence rail, and a long, bumpy ride out of town would have been a much more appropriate way to effect his exit from the gun enthusiast community!” A more common theme was that anything less than fierce, absolute opposition to any regulation amounted to treason. “Anyone who says ‘I believe in the Second Amendment, but–’ does not believe in the Second Amendment,” one commenter posted. Or, as another wrote: “Compromise is what the Jews tried with Hitler.”

The hijacking of our movement by these radical extremists causes me to fear for the future of the right I have spent my adult life fighting to defend. At present, we defenders of the Second Amendment have the American mainstream voters on our side. Nearly two-thirds of the 109 new state firearms laws enacted in the year following the Newtown shooting actually eased gun restrictions and expanded gun-owners’ rights. During that same period there was no significant federal firearms legislation at all. But when we engage in noisy, extremist rhetoric rejecting all firearms regulation whatsoever, or refuse to acknowledge the plain fact that constitutionally validated regulations and statutes already exist, we risk alienating the American mainstream . And if we lose that mainstream, we will lose this war.

***

I grew up on a small-town Illinois family farm, where guns were simply tools to be respected, like my mother’s hot kitchen skillet or my dad’s power saw. My father and uncle first let me shoot a .22 rifle when I was five. As a 9-year-old, I would often take the .22 from behind the kitchen door and go out alone to shoot squirrels or rabbits for Sunday dinner. Understanding the mechanics of firearms became a lifelong hobby, and eventually a livelihood.

I’m definitely a gun guy, but I don’t love guns. Does a carpenter love hammers? (OK, maybe he loves his favorite hammer. I know I love my Winchester big-loop Model 94 lever-action rifle.) I do, however, love the firearms community at large. The shooters, hunters and gun owners I’ve met during the past 37 years are as a group the most honorable, upright and common-sense people I’ve known. The same goes for the people who work in the firearms industry and in outdoor journalism. They represent a true cross section of American society, and I’ve always felt honored to count myself among them.

Since my column ran, I’ve received supportive messages—emails, voice mails, phone calls, even actual letters—from literally thousands of people. They continue to pour in, especially since the New York Times wrote about my termination earlier this month. The number astounds me. For a while it was running more than 100 a day. But only a tiny handful of those people have dared to express their views publicly, and those who did were attacked as vituperatively and unthinkingly as I was.

I’ve been told by a former colleague at IMO that just 40 of Guns & Ammo’s 400,000-plus readers actually canceled their subscriptions. That’s less than one one-hundredth of one percent. I can’t verify this figure, but I have no reason to doubt it. Likewise, there’s no way to know the actual number of messages the gun makers who pressured IMO received from individuals threatening never to buy their products again. These companies are the largest firearms manufacturers in the United States, each selling well over a million guns a year to consumers. It’s hard to imagine there’s any significant number of people who would actually have stopped buying their guns merely because of my apostasy. To my mind, any company that makes business decisions based on what one one-hundredth of one percent of its customers say is sailing toward the rocks. Extend this phenomenon to Congress (where it is equally real), and you’ll understand why I tremble for our country.

The task of calling me with IMO’s termination notice fell to Jim Bequette. Jim and I had worked as a team for 35 years, beginning with Shooting Times in Peoria in 1977. With consolidations, mergers and acquisitions, we eventually wound up with Jim as vice president/editorial director and me as executive technical editor for InterMedia Outdoors, working on magazines like Guns & Ammo, RifleShooter, Game & Fish, Petersen’s Hunting, Handguns, North American Whitetail, Crossbow Revolution and dozens of others—as well as various television productions. For many years we didn’t even use a written contract, merely relying on a handshake agreement. This was not unusual in the firearms industry, which has always prided itself on its “traditional American values.” But even within that industry, our partnership was renowned for its successful longevity—“Mr. Inside & Mr. Outside,” we were called, and “The Odd Couple” because he’s quiet and reserved, and I’m outgoing and exuberant—enduring longer than most marriages. In fact, he was best man at my wedding.

"I started shooting at age five," writes Metcalf. "By the time I turned 12, my parents gave me an NRA Life Membership." | Photo courtesy of the author

When Jim called to break the news, our conversation was somber. He had approved the column topic months in advance, and I had submitted my draft six weeks before press date. It was edited, reviewed and vetted by the Guns & Ammo editorial staff and publisher before it went to the printer. It was bannered on the top of the magazine’s cover. The column’s title, “Let’s Talk Limits,” was written by an associate editor. (The incendiary word “limits” appeared nowhere in the column itself.) So sending me to the guillotine seemed a bit out of line. I was not really surprised, though, because the company’s silence over the previous few days had already signaled its intention. Jim told me he regretted that he was powerless to prevent it. A sad end to a decades-long relationship. We haven’t spoken since.

All constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.”

Why did I write it in the first place? Jim and I had discussed the topic when he first gave me the column five months earlier. We had addressed the same subject many times before in a variety of articles and columns for other magazines over the years, and we both felt it was something Guns & Ammo readers should be thinking about. I still believe that. The existing body of literature and legal precedent on the Second Amendment is much like the Bible: One can find something to support nearly any agenda. Even the Founders themselves wrote many different things at different times (with commas in different places) about what they meant by a Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Or by “well regulated.” Or by “militia.” I wish more people would actually read those writings.

***

My interest in Second Amendment law goes back to the mid-1960s, when I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University. I’d arrived on campus carrying an attaché case with a “Goldwater for President” sticker, but I nonetheless volunteered as a research aide for the Committee on Illinois Government—an offshoot of the Illinois Democratic Party oriented toward developing “reform” policies. If you were a political science student interested in real politics in Chicago in those days, the Democrats were the biggest game in town (still are, come to think of it).

The project was to create a comprehensive proposal for revising Illinois’s gun control laws. While researching existing laws and crime statistics in all 50 states I came to an inescapable conclusion: Gun control had essentially zero effect on reducing crime—for the simple reason that criminals by definition didn’t obey those laws. Mostly, gun control laws created a new class of criminals: ordinary citizens who ran afoul of them. I saw it not as a political statement, just a fact.

I continued studying the Second Amendment while in graduate school at Yale and then as a history professor there and at Cornell. It was during my time at Cornell that I began writing a “Firearms Law” column for Shooting Times. The column led to my working with NRA-ILA Executive Director Neal Knox to help draft a 1986 law that eased or eliminated many of the restrictions and statutory confusions created by the federal Gun Control Act of 1968.

I left Cornell in 1979 and moved back to the family farm in Illinois, where I have remained active in the fight to protect our Second Amendment rights. In 2007 I authored a resolution adopted verbatim by 89 percent of Illinois counties objecting to passage of any further state firearms laws. Not a single item of restrictive firearms legislation has since passed the Illinois state legislature. In 2012 I co-authored an ordinance for Pike County establishing what we called “constitutional carry”—in direct contravention of Illinois law. When it was placed on the 2012 county election ballot by petition, it passed with 87 percent of the vote. And, of course, last year I was up to my eyeballs in the effort to enact Illinois’s new concealed-carry law.

None of which made any difference when my Guns & Ammo column ran afoul of the social-media piranha swarm. I don’t think the nature of the fundamentalist outlook has really changed at all since I first started writing about Second Amendment issues for the Shooting Times back in the 1970s. But the form of expression permitted by the instant communication and social-media revolution sure has changed, playing right into the growing American intolerance for divergent opinions.

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For the record: I believe the Second Amendment means exactly what it says. Just as I believe all other amendments in the Bill of Rights mean exactly what they say. All of them affirm absolute rights. But unlike freedom of speech or freedom of religion or freedom of the press, the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms is today the focus of an increasingly bitter battle between those of us who believe deeply in that particular right, and those who believe the Second Amendment is an obsolete 18 th century artifact that should be curtailed or repealed.

Metcalf hunting African buffalo. | Photo courtesy of the author

The year will be pivotal. Opponents of the Second Amendment promise to pour unprecedented energy and money into the 2014 election cycle. Second Amendment supporters vow to fight those efforts to their last breath.

Both sides believe they have the American mainstream on their side. But when Second Amendment supporters argue it is unconstitutional to bar convicted felons from acquiring guns, the American mainstream stops listening. When Second Amendment supporters argue it is unconstitutional to require any training whatsoever before carrying a concealed firearm in public, the American mainstream stops listening. Likewise, when anti-gunners call for the repeal of the Second Amendment and the prohibition of citizen firearms ownership, the American mainstream stops listening. When extremist anti-gun and anti-hunting voices aim death threats at the children of those who would bid on a license to legally cull an African game animal and donate the proceeds to endangered-species conservation, the American mainstream cringes.

All Americans want to find ways to keep horrors like Newtown from happening. But Americans need solutions, not political placebos or public relations gestures. And certainly not more hate speech. Not since the Civil War has there been a greater need in this country for reasoned, civil discourse instead of extremist rhetoric. Never has it been more important for our public officials and our corporate leaders to make rational decisions instead of bowing down to the strident voices of a radical few.