Regular readers know the term “Fudd.” It references Elmer Fudd, the cartoon buffoon who hunted wascaly wabbits and ditzy ducks without success. In the gun rights world, a “Fudd” is a gun owner whose single-minded obsession with hunting blinds him to threats against Americans’ natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. He’s ready, willing and able to sacrifice his gun rights on the altar of public safety – because magazine capacity laws, universal background checks, modern sporting rifle bans and the like have nothing to do with hunting. Although antis love ’em, Fudds rarely appear in public discourse. But sometimes they do . . .
As I grew older I began to notice a different breed of hunter; men who showed up with multiple shotguns as if they were golf clubs needed for specific shots. While most of us wore jeans, t-shirts and hunting vests, these newcomers dressed like they were going on safari, wearing bush hats, shooting jackets (in the 100 degree heat), and cargo pants with more pockets than there existed implements to fill them. You would see them walking the fields; shotgun draped over one arm, can of beer in the other hand. We learned to stay away from them.
For these men hunting was a manhood thing, a way to get in touch with their alpha male, a way to prove they weren’t soft city dwellers and what better way to do that than to get together with some buddies and shoot some guns at whatever moved.
It was no coincidence that, at this same time (this being early seventies), the NRA changed their focus from hunting programs to promoting gun ownership and defending the 2nd Amendment from imaginary enemies.
Each trip afield meant running into more men concerned with the idea of shooting but unburdened with any concept of the etiquette of hunting. For an adult, all you needed was the cash to purchased a gun and a hunting license and you were good to go forth and kill.
This excerpt from I was the NRA at rawstory.com marks the moment when writer TBogg moved from being an NRA supporter – “We felt safe in the field because the NRA had taught us how to be safe”- to an NRA hater.
As the text indicates, TBogg is suffering from severe GOML (Get Off My Lawn) disease. The affliction that prevents him from seeing that the NRA is still teaching millions of Americans firearms safety – in the field, at home and on the streets. Talk about denial . . . The idea that the Second Amendment’s enemies are imaginary is utterly preposterous. As is his contention that the NRA’s fight for gun rights is [somehow] responsible for the [supposed] degradation of hunting etiquette.
That said, TBogg’s rant offers an important insight into the mind of a Fudd. His beliefs are based on the exact same elitism that anti-gunners’ display when they try to restrict firearms ownership to the police, themselves and/or their bodyguards. We’re good enough for guns. The unwashed rabble? Not at all.
The NRA has killed off the sportsman with their neglect and replaced him with the gun nut who spends more money on more guns, not out of a desire to feed his family, but to stave off a mythical jack-booted government bogeyman coming to take away those guns. This paranoid vision of America that the NRA sells is why we have the gun violence that we have today, because no sensible gun legislation can be passed because of what the father of one of Elliott Rodger’s victims described as “craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA.”
I’m not the NRA poster child that I was at age 8 anymore. I want nothing to do with those people.
I may be a natural born killer, but I’ll be damned if I’ll be an accomplice to murder.
Then publish and be damned. Because anyone who’s OK with disarming law-abiding Americans, anyone who works to limit or remove their ability to defend innocent life by force of arms, is, in fact, an accomplice to murder. That’s all folks.
If nonsense like this is what Fudds bring to the gun debate, perhaps it’s for the best that they remain vewy, vewy quiet.
I agwee……….
hahahahaha. I can hear the Fudd voice and laugh in my head, it won’t go away!
Or stick their foot in their own bear traps….
In my direct experience most of these guys fall into two categories:
1) they don’t actually own, and have never owned a gun. On the net they are meatpuppets and in person you can simply asks a few basic questions and invariable they say something showing they don’t know which end of the barrel is which.
2) Elite hunters. Years ago I worked for one. Major fowl hunter in Cali. Also a major Democrat. He was born and raised in Europe and came in his late teens and made a lot, a real lot of money. Good for him. I went fowl hunting with him a few times. He owned extremely expensive guns. He associated hunting with being elite, as they do in Europe. Just as they have always associated the right to bearing arms, and hunting, with being something only for the elite. So he believe in class mobility, the America an economic dream, but believed also only the upper class could be trusted with arms. Think Downton Abbey, the game wardens of Europe insuring the deer belong to the nobility, in fact reread you Homer. This has been the Euro view for a long time.
By the way I do think the NRA goes over the top sometimes with its language. So does the ACLU, so does the NAACP, so does every lawyer arguing in defense of any and every civil liberty and civil right before Scotus.
Is JFUDD saying if you belong to the ACLU does this make you “an accomplice to murder?”
I’d be willing to bet the author of this piece is NOT a Fudd at all and that he has likely never really been hunting either.
I loved hunting and the NRA when I was 8 but, now that I am grown up and educated, I don’t….. said no one ever…
I actually had an argument with an Idiot who tried to tell me about the “right to hunt”. (as in, he thought the 2A explicitly meant- the right to hunt, and nothing else.) Boy did he get an education that day.
I call BS. I recall hunting in the Imperial Valley in CA back in the early 70’s. The folks he describes were wandering around then. I remember as part of an Explorer Post hunting trip driving past an alfalfa field surrounded by folks like that. Complete with tons of dogs. At sunrise everyone started marching into the field like a huge circular firing squad, shooting at the occasional pheasant- I have no idea how anybody was going to sort out who out of the 10-15 guys in the vicinity had hit it, much less claim it (or a part of it). Nothing has changed, there have always been hunters who either didn’t know or didn’t care about etiquette or hunted for the motives he ascribes of ‘alpha’ male etc.
Tbogg’s been this way for years. Frankly, I’m surprised he owned any firearms based on how virulently anti- anything perceived as even the slightest right-of-center he is.
Is it this guy?
http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/
Wow, what an arrogant, self important, a-hole. Normally, I like people who like dogs…in his case I’ll make an exception.
What is he trying to represent with that dumb ass stupid sloppy looking outfit?
What’s the term for a gun owner whose single-minded obsession with the second amendment blinds him to threats against Americans’ natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms?
For that matter –
What’s the term for a gun owner whose single-minded obsession with the second amendment blinds him to threats against the other Amendments and the Constitution itself?
OCD.
“…stave off a mythical jack-booted government bogeyman …”
Does being a Fudd mean having absolutely no knowledge of or appreciation of human history?
So it would seem.
In the mind of an anti-Fudd, yes.
Yes. Not to mention current events.
Nor knowledge of American history, apparently.
“In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States.
Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934. Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none of them were brought up on criminal charges. Still, the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee did at least acknowledge the existence of the conspiracy, which ended up never getting past the initial planning stages.”
http://www.cracked.com/article_15974_7-insane-conspiracies-that-actually-happened.html
And, yes, that’s the same Bush, as in father of George Bush Senior, and grandfather of George Bush Junior.
Nothing troubling about that. Move on citizens, nothing to see.
That would be Franklin Rooooosevelt? A despicable socialist and the 2nd worst president in the last 100yrs?
Indeed.
Was about to post the same thing. Usually, something that shows up in human history time and time again would preclude it from being “mythical.”
Another person that refuses to listen to any view point but his own, and don’t bother trying to confuse him with the facts. I am sure he would put his fingers in his ears and loudly chant LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA until you gave up.
The gun violence we have today? Sorry, Fudd, crime is at all time lows, especially compared to the seventies. The “Can of beer” comment also screams BS, the antis love that image. This is nothing more than recycled garbage we have been hearing for years
He says: “This paranoid vision of America that the NRA sells is why we have the gun violence that we have today, ”
He, and his ilk, can go eat a twenty pound bag of pitbull shit.
Darn tooting he’s just another elitist, racist lamenting that all of us “dirty people” are allowed to do and to own the same things he can.
As I’ve said before, I’ll bet that there are more black people that are members of my gun club than there are black people who are members of Bloomberg’s golf club.
The Fudd can FOAD.
When I lived on the North Shore of Boston, I had a chat with my state representative, the scion of a patrician Yankee family, who was an avid bird hunter and the possessor of a large number of bespoke English shotguns and the obligatory tweed and moleskin field garb. I was concerned about the latest in a series of confiscatory gun laws that were about to be debated before the MA legislature. He told me, “You handgunners are always so paranoid about supposedly losing your rights. No one is going to take your guns away.” Well, as they say in law school, “Res ipse loquitur.” Any gun owner in MA can tell you what happened to their rights since Chapter 180 passed in 1998, and it ain’t good.
Reminds me of a sci-fi kind of show I was watching once. In a future where the gov’t had pretty well taken over everything, people ate “nutra-cakes” that they got with gov’t vouchers. The watchword of society was “nobody starves.” The show, of course was about a couple caught up in some kind of glitch where they couldn’t get their vouchers. And everywhere they went, everyone they talked to, all they heard was “we can’t help you–but don’t worry, nobody starves”. Same deal: “Nobody’s coming after your guns”, even as the politicos literally mumble to themselves “confiscate, confiscate, confiscate”.
Good riddance. Have fun in Cretinville!
Fudd, as opposed to FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).
Fudd generally being a person, verses FUD which is generally what Fudd spreads everywhere they go?
So that being said, I’m not sure I agree with Fudd being a gun owner… Yes, there are some but I always considered arrogant egotistical individuals with weak minds ( at least in certain areas ) Fudd’s. In the case of guns, I would consider a number of the anti-gun crowd to be Fudds, as they seem to be arrogant and egotistical enough to think that they are the only ones with the intelligence and moral high ground and the right to tell everyone else what should be done with guns, a subject that they seem to have very little mental capacity to understand. The messages that these groups spread would generally be FUD, in an effort to get others to buy into their mindset.
In some cases, as pointed out above, the anti-gun crowd manages to turn a gun owner into a Fudd. In such cases, all you can do is try to get them to remember the things they forgot.
While you were at it you should have touched on the NRAs rule number one, “Never load your firearm until you are on the firing line”, as the root cause of the “Gee, I didn’t know the gun was loaded”, “accidents”.
The correct rule one is: “All guns are always loaded all the time”. Quite the polar opposite….
I don’t get the “all guns are always loaded all the time rule” because guns are frequently not loaded and treated as such by 100% of gun owners (cleaning, dry firing, etc.). I get that you should always assume all guns are loaded until you check them yourself to make sure they’re not and that you should always maintain muzzle and trigger discipline even when you think guns are not loaded. So why not just say that?
Because using that many words makes the brain hurt. In a perfect world the only gun safety rule we would need would be “don’t do stupid s##t with it.” We don’t live in a perfect world, there are idiots among us, and so people come up with such impossible-to-follow hyperbolic rules as “treat the gun as if it’s always loaded.”
Yeah you dry fire, but even though you “know” the gun’s not loaded, you still do it in the safest direction possible.
It must be quite comforting to be simple minded…
As I grew older I began to notice a different breed of hunter; men who showed up with multiple shotguns as if they were golf clubs needed for specific shots.
And what exactly is the problem with this?
Example: three years ago I was hunting in Montana, and it was a very early freeze and snow. Three of us went high up into the hills where we knew there to be a herd of elk. Temperatures got well below freezing. When we got back to the truck, I went to dump the internal box mag on my old BSA .270. It was so cold that when I released the floorplate, the magazine spring snapped in half and fell from the rifle.
Were it not for the fact that I brought another rifle, I would’ve been stuck with a single-shot .270 – but then again that probably would’ve been just fine with this guy.
While most of us wore jeans, t-shirts and hunting vests, these newcomers dressed like they were going on safari, wearing bush hats, shooting jackets (in the 100 degree heat), and cargo pants with more pockets than there existed implements to fill them. You would see them walking the fields; shotgun draped over one arm, can of beer in the other hand. We learned to stay away from them.
Huh, that’s funny. It’s my experience that the hunters out in their jeans and T-shirts are usually the ones who can be found carrying a beer, and they usually toss it in the woods to boot.
For these men hunting was a manhood thing, a way to get in touch with their alpha male, a way to prove they weren’t soft city dwellers and what better way to do that than to get together with some buddies and shoot some guns at whatever moved.
Again, in my experience, the guys in T-shirts and jeans are usually the ones who tend to shoot at anything that moves.
Furthermore, hunters in T-shirts and jeans are usually not prepared for things that can happen in the woods. No extra clothing, no overnight supplies, no emergency medical supplies. In the places I hunt, in mountains and high country, these are the sort of casual hunters who get themselves into trouble when accidents happen.
I guess hunters who prepare for unexpected things happening are just not his type. It seems to fit in with the rest of his world view.
It was no coincidence that, at this same time (this being early seventies), the NRA changed their focus from hunting programs to promoting gun ownership and defending the 2nd Amendment from imaginary enemies.
Perhaps that would have something to do with the 1970s and 1980s being the relative beginning of modern anti-gun political movement, and so the NRA responded appropriately before things snowballed out of control, and this “hunter” quickly found his trusty shotgun regulated out of his possession.
Each trip afield meant running into more men concerned with the idea of shooting but unburdened with any concept of the etiquette of hunting. For an adult, all you needed was the cash to purchased a gun and a hunting license and you were good to go forth and kill.
There are far less hunters today than there were in his day, so frankly I have no idea what he’s talking about.
I do have my issues with some modern hunting trends (e.g. ATVs everywhere), but the etiquette is still very much alive and well.
The NRA has killed off the sportsman with their neglect and replaced him with the gun nut who spends more money on more guns, not out of a desire to feed his family, but to stave off a mythical jack-booted government bogeyman coming to take away those guns. This paranoid vision of America that the NRA sells is why we have the gun violence that we have today, because no sensible gun legislation can be passed because of what the father of one of Elliott Rodger’s victims described as “craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA.”
Since the NRA does what its membership asks of it, how is any of this to blame on the NRA?
No gun control can be passed? Seriously? Did the Santa Barbara shooting not happen in probably THE most heavily-regulated state in the country with regards to gun ownership? What did it achieve?
I’m not the NRA poster child that I was at age 8 anymore. I want nothing to do with those people.
I may be a natural born killer, but I’ll be damned if I’ll be an accomplice to murder.
You never were the NRA poster child. You were a poor excuse for a member, who is willing to throw fellow gun owners and hunters under the bus, because of your disdain for how they dress, how they hunt, and what kinds of guns they like to own.
The last sentence is just pure hyperbole, but I suppose it makes a good hook for places like Rawstory.
That last sentence also self-identifies a potential homicidal maniac. Mental health, you know…
TBogg may not be a FUDD or any other kind of hunter. I’m getting a whiff of false flag, which is polite way of saying bullshit.
Wait, you’re saying someone may be completely making up a story in order to force their agenda onto others? Inconceivable!
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
It might be this guy.
http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/
Exactly. Why assume that it was written by any type of gun owner?
So what’s mythical about gubmint jack booted thugs? Tell that to the victims of Katrina..or the Japanese internment of WW2. Did anyone catch the good citizens of Boston accquiese to the gubmint last year after the Tsarniev brothers pressure cooker crap? We are all one disaster away from the same fate.
Oh, yeah, I totally believe that TBoggs hunts to “feed his family”. Ass.
Although the NRA has retained gun safety as one of their core educational values, I was under the impression that most state-mandated hunter training programs were something other than NRA. In my state, hunter education instructors are certified by the Fish and Wildlife dept, not NRA (unlike other programs, for instance, basic pistol instruction that’s required in some states to apply for a CCW.)
Most (if not all) state Fish & Wildlife courses are adapted from the NRA materials, with “local” material added. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
“…shall not be infringed, and by the way, hunters will have etiquette, so we don’t piss off TBogg in 2014 or other select, polite citizens for which the bill of rights was solely intended, if we do offend any proprieties, the first point of this amendment is not ok”
seriously people, go back and read the 2A, those founder guys were prophetic, it’s all in there.
Sorry, should be “hunted” instead of “hunts”–seems he has sworn off hunting because some city slicker almost shot his father’s bird dog. He’s still an ass, of the most pompous variety.
some city slicker almost shot his father’s bird dog.
Was the city sicker wearing a badge?
No, he was wearing a hunting vest (as opposed to the TBogg-approved uniform for “real”, non-NRA hunters, jeans and T-shirt.)
Some ‘city slicker’ hunters have shot several dogs on my street (one with a freakin’ bow) over the years. I don’t blame the NRA, I blame stupid, stupid people.
I always kinda wondered about the term “Fudd.” Elmer was the obvious choice but I’d seen it spelled “FUD” so I wondered if maybe it stood for something…
“FUD” actually does stand for “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt”. It’s basically the Precautionary Principle turned into a public relations strategy. The goal is to convince people that there’s some chance that the target is unsafe (uncertainty and doubt) and then use that uncertainty and doubt to create fear, which will motivate people to oppose the target.
Past or ongoing targets include firearms, nuclear power (almost any form of power generation, actually, but nuclear is the best example), and DDT.
Hate to say it, but we all know it to be true, but the sooner these FUDDs die off, the better.
So he calls himself a natural born killer?
I noticed the Fudd in question didn’t seem keen to help out with any of this missing “etiquette” education.
There’s plenty of Fudds living here in Upstate N.Y.. These range queens and urban dwelling, weekend hunters have no clue what the 2nd amendment is for.
Like Ralph above mentions, this sounds like BS
However, he sounds like the Fudds I have met in CT. My favorite being the one that came into a LGS needing Ammo only to find out he now needed a permit just to purchase Ammo. He finally saw the light of day once the laws impacted him. Now I finally see him at the rallies.
More #oogaboogaNRA idiocy. This clown thinks Eddie Eagle teaches about the Second Amendment instead of safety. He blames social change in rapidly growing 1970s San Diego on the NRA. I’m about the same age as he is. Guess what–a lot of things have changed since we were kids. For example, we never used to lock our house and cars, but later we had to start doing that. That’s not the NRA’s fault.
You may want to check your research. The NRA always and only promoted marksmanship and gun safety since its inception. It wasn’t until the 70’s when they branched out to hunters, even debuting a new magazine; American Hunter. The NRA “got it.” They knew then that if they didn’t reach the fudds, the largest population of gun owners in America, those clinging to their double-barreled shotguns; they just might lose a group necessary for their fight. They saw the writing on the wall then. Too bad the fudd’s have missed the point entirely. BTW – Those gussied-up clowns and “weekend warriors” prowled the fields when I was a kid more fifty years ago. I’m sure they did in my dad’s time too. They have always been out there, trying to impress others and themselves. Only once the weather got cold or foul you never saw them again.
Basically, I’m with the guys who don’t believe “Fudd” is a real gun owner– I think the alleged Fudds are people who owned a .22 years ago who pretend they are hunters. I don’t know a serious hunter from any economic class (including Democrats) who is not a 2nd Amendment defender. I call bullshit– I think these are people trying to divide us by convincing young & non- hunting 2nd Amendment defenders and black gun fans that hunters oppose them.
The Fudd mentality is quite common even down under. You will not only find them in the SSAA (Sporting Shooters Association of Australia) but in other organizations as well. The attitude of the SSAA regarding self-loading rifles was to ban them and ignore the owners in the hope that repeating rifles and their benchrest would be left alone. That decision caused me to ignore the SSAA for a decade. Unfortunately they are the biggest single national shooting sports group and among the most powerful lobbyists.
With the NRAA (National Rifle Association Australia) and the state based bodies such as the NSWRA, the attitude of the full-bore “belly-floppers” (aka knob-twirlers and other names) was if the service rifle shooters were sacrificed then they would be left alone. The service rifle section was the fastest (and only) growing sector of the NRAA so you could imagine how much tension there was. It did not take long before the gun-grabbers revealed their true intentions to ban all guns. Facing this threat is what finally brought the various groups and factions together.