Guns & Ammo fires a top writer after he suggests that some regulations don't violate 2nd Amendment

Dick Metcalf

If you buy Guns & Ammo magazine or one of its competitors, here's fair warning that you may be getting what advertisers want instead of independent reporting and editing, which is supposed to be an essential hallmark of American journalism: The magazine fired one of the nation's top gun writers after he wrote a column questioning whether certain regulations really infringed the right to keep and bear arms and gun makers threatened to pull their ads unless he was canned. It was no surprise to people who know the trade, The New York Times' Ravi Somaiya reports.

UPDATE, Jan. 14: Metcalf writes for Politico Magazine that the magazine's parent company, Intermedia Outdoors, removed its vice president and editorial director from his position as editor of Guns & Ammo. As for the wild replies and threats made by the "social-media piranha swarm" in response to his column, he writes, "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. . . . 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." (Read more)