10 ms·

When you get into hunting/sportsman's issues, you might find yourself surprised at how politically...moderate it can be. I was. My wife's extended family is re

When you get into hunting/sportsman's issues, you might find yourself surprised at how politically...moderate it can be. I was. My wife's extended family is really into hunting so I ended up taking a gun safety course to get my hunting license. A LOT of gun safety is preached there. Don't brandish your weapons or your prey publicly; keep them to yourself. Always assume a gun is loaded. When carrying a loaded gun, hold it a certain way. When walking with a loaded gun, don't point more than 15-20 degrees in either direction if someone is standing next to you. Lock your guns separately from your ammo. And so on. There are a lot of environmentalists (preservationists?) working for the state in this field as well. Managing deer population levels, preventing forest fires, not littering, that kind of thing. So while I was a bit surprised to see a 'red state' kind of company advocating for federal control of these lands, I suppose I shouldn't have been. There's a lot of room for nuance in this country.

ethbro 10y ago
If you want to see where this comes from, I'd recommend reading a Teddy Roosevelt biography (e.g. Morris). He became one of the first powerful conservationists because he saw, in just a few decades, the impact that development was having on the West. Inside almost every hunter or fisherman, there's a desire to see someone else enjoy it as much as you. And that can't happen if one leaves the land poorer after they use it.
jamesrcole 10y ago
> When you get into hunting/sportsman's issues, you might find yourself surprised at how politically...moderate it can be. I was. > My wife's extended family is really into hunting so I ended up taking a gun safety course to get my hunting license. A LOT of gun safety is preached there. [examples] The gun safety doesn't surprise me at all. But it's a bit unclear to me, are you saying that's to do with it being politically moderate?
- Brendinooo 10y ago
  I guess the picture painted of the pro-gun folks is often the extreme end - open carry, walk around college campuses with assault rifles to protest their rights - so it was perception-altering to see instruction along the lines of "don't display your gun in the car window" or whatever, and then to look around and realize that most people act that way. I'll see plenty of stories about gun deaths via carelessness (Dad leaves a gun cabinet unlocked, six-year-old shoots his sister by mistake, that kind of thing), and the commentary/agenda around that tends to be "and this is why we need more gun control", and then you get arguments against that from the other side. So perhaps in my mind advocacy for safety was conflated with advocacy against guns, so it was mildly surprising to see that not only is rigorous safety taught, but it's also practiced by owners of firearms. In other words, perhaps I read too many comment sections on partisan platforms! Pretty much every time I get out into the real world I see that people are never as extreme as their online counterparts.
  - jamesrcole 10y ago
    Ok, I understand now
  - MicroBerto 10y ago
    > I guess the picture painted of the pro-gun folks is often the extreme end Glad you got to understand what REAL law-abiding gun owners are like. We are maniacs over safety and responsibility. Don't let the press demonize such things. The legal ones aren't the ones to worry about. And everyone I know in Texas who carries in a medium-to-large size city is still doing it concealed. Out of sight, out of mind.
roflc0ptic 10y ago
Conservationists. There's a distinction made between conservation and preservation - skipping the details I mostly don't remember, on average conservationists want to use resources "wisely" (sustainable forestry, low impact mining, controlled hunting) where preservationists believe more in the intrinsic value of the land, and frequently be more against logging at all, or mining at all. In my experience most environmentalists like or at least agree with hunting, but most of them are also conservationists. Also, somewhat off topic: the need to manage deer populations is a direct result of killing large predators, and our tendency to break up large local biomes into smaller fragmented ones. No wolves + lots of edge habitat = lots of deer.
- Qwertious 10y ago
  It bugs me that "conservationist" and "conservative" are two entirely different words (with entirely different meanings). It shouldn't be like that at all.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    As a conservative & conservationist, I feel that they mean much the same. I want to conserve, preserve & improve nature for our benefit, and I want to conserve, preserve & improve our culture and government for our benefit as well.
- jaegerpicker 10y ago
  You are partly right about the need to manager deer populations but the key problem is that the cat is out of the bag, in regards to sprawl and large predators. The basic fact is that we are never going to reverse that unless there is sweeping and catastrophic changes to society. Also that leaves a HUGE reason to manage deer populations, hunting itself. Many people use hunting to supplement their normal meat supply and without some form of Government management wildlife would be quickly destroyed. See the American Bison as an example, though just one of many.
  - roflc0ptic 10y ago
    Wholly agreed. Given where we're at, hunt away. WRT to bison, their population is depleted specifically because of the US government's Native American eradication program. The US military provided bullets to hunters. The iconic image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bison_skull_pile-restored.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bison_skull_pile-restored... this was policy. And in fact, the USG still works to limit their population - http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/ http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/ find themselves regularly in conflict with... BLM, I think. Some federal group(s), at any rate.
ryanwaggoner 10y ago
Fewer than 20% of gun owners are active hunters [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if it's as low as 10%, and more than a few of those hunters are pretty casual about gun safety and conservation, in my experience. A little off topic, but...my experience is that many gun owners (maybe most?) are far too casual about gun safety. I'm a 2nd amendment supporter and lean libertarian, BUT I'm also a pragmatist. I think it's absolutely ludicrous that we don't have strong national standards and licensing requirements for acquiring, owning, and carrying firearms. I'm a pilot, and the amount of effort I had to put into being able to fly a small airplane is orders of magnitude greater than that required to walk into a store and walk out with a weapon designed to kill people. I think you should be required to go through initial training, safely store your firearms, and go through refresher training every 2 years. At minimum. 1. http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/us-gun-owners-outnumbered-hunters-5-1-2011 http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/us-gun-owners-outnumbere...
- zepto 10y ago
  Whilst I agree with you about the need for people to know gun safety rules, your requirements seem unrealistically reactive. Most gun owners in the US barely if ever shoot their guns, and the number of accidents or deaths that result from unsafe handling is negligible. You would save more lives by requiring training every 2 years for an license to buy aspirin.
  - 542458 10y ago
    For anybody else curious about actual numbers... In 2013 it was 505 deaths due to negligent handling (vs 11,208 homicides and 21,175 suicides). I'm not able to find any numbers for accidental Aspirin overdose specifically. NSAID use in general kills about 16,500 people yearly, but that number includes drugs other than Aspirin and doesn't differentiate accidental overdose vs suicides or complications from use as prescribed.
    - zepto 10y ago
      Those numbers suggest that the two problems are in very much the same ballpark. Conservative estimates suggest that 1 in 3 Americans own guns. A mandatory training every other year would be an approx $2Bn program annually. (Based on $50 per person per class including administration, which seems very conservative to me) It seems obvious that if you had $2Bn per year to spend on preventing avoidable deaths, this would be an extremely low priority.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
scaryspooky 10y ago
You cannot be an environmentalist and also for prevention of forest fires, however given the mismanagement of the forests we're now in a very dangerous situation where the forests are too dense and fires will be too hot so recovery from a fire will take a very long time instead of being the productive and beneficial activity that forest fires once were.
TheGirondin 10y ago
This is due in large part to the Colbert effect. The only source for what liberals believe conservatives think comes from sources like Colbert or Stewart. It's part of a much broader issue that has lead to the "the sky is falling," "fascism is just around the corner" hysteria since Trump won.
- tasty_freeze 10y ago
  You are making the same mistake. One poster here says they are surprised that all gun owners aren't like Ted Nugent. You blame it on the "Colbert Effect". Where do you get your impression that liberals all think that the poster you are responding to?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gojiberry 10y ago
I just don't get how killing another living being can be a sport?

ethbro 10y ago

If you want to see where this comes from, I'd recommend reading a Teddy Roosevelt biography (e.g. Morris). He became one of the first powerful conservationists because he saw, in just a few decades, the impact that development was having on the West. Inside almost every hunter or fisherman, there's a desire to see someone else enjoy it as much as you. And that can't happen if one leaves the land poorer after they use it.

jamesrcole 10y ago

> When you get into hunting/sportsman's issues, you might find yourself surprised at how politically...moderate it can be. I was. > My wife's extended family is really into hunting so I ended up taking a gun safety course to get my hunting license. A LOT of gun safety is preached there. [examples] The gun safety doesn't surprise me at all. But it's a bit unclear to me, are you saying that's to do with it being politically moderate?

Brendinooo 10y ago
I guess the picture painted of the pro-gun folks is often the extreme end - open carry, walk around college campuses with assault rifles to protest their rights - so it was perception-altering to see instruction along the lines of "don't display your gun in the car window" or whatever, and then to look around and realize that most people act that way. I'll see plenty of stories about gun deaths via carelessness (Dad leaves a gun cabinet unlocked, six-year-old shoots his sister by mistake, that kind of thing), and the commentary/agenda around that tends to be "and this is why we need more gun control", and then you get arguments against that from the other side. So perhaps in my mind advocacy for safety was conflated with advocacy against guns, so it was mildly surprising to see that not only is rigorous safety taught, but it's also practiced by owners of firearms. In other words, perhaps I read too many comment sections on partisan platforms! Pretty much every time I get out into the real world I see that people are never as extreme as their online counterparts.
- jamesrcole 10y ago
  Ok, I understand now
- MicroBerto 10y ago
  > I guess the picture painted of the pro-gun folks is often the extreme end Glad you got to understand what REAL law-abiding gun owners are like. We are maniacs over safety and responsibility. Don't let the press demonize such things. The legal ones aren't the ones to worry about. And everyone I know in Texas who carries in a medium-to-large size city is still doing it concealed. Out of sight, out of mind.

roflc0ptic 10y ago

Conservationists. There's a distinction made between conservation and preservation - skipping the details I mostly don't remember, on average conservationists want to use resources "wisely" (sustainable forestry, low impact mining, controlled hunting) where preservationists believe more in the intrinsic value of the land, and frequently be more against logging at all, or mining at all. In my experience most environmentalists like or at least agree with hunting, but most of them are also conservationists. Also, somewhat off topic: the need to manage deer populations is a direct result of killing large predators, and our tendency to break up large local biomes into smaller fragmented ones. No wolves + lots of edge habitat = lots of deer.

Qwertious 10y ago
It bugs me that "conservationist" and "conservative" are two entirely different words (with entirely different meanings). It shouldn't be like that at all.
- zeveb 10y ago
  As a conservative & conservationist, I feel that they mean much the same. I want to conserve, preserve & improve nature for our benefit, and I want to conserve, preserve & improve our culture and government for our benefit as well.
jaegerpicker 10y ago
You are partly right about the need to manager deer populations but the key problem is that the cat is out of the bag, in regards to sprawl and large predators. The basic fact is that we are never going to reverse that unless there is sweeping and catastrophic changes to society. Also that leaves a HUGE reason to manage deer populations, hunting itself. Many people use hunting to supplement their normal meat supply and without some form of Government management wildlife would be quickly destroyed. See the American Bison as an example, though just one of many.
- roflc0ptic 10y ago
  Wholly agreed. Given where we're at, hunt away. WRT to bison, their population is depleted specifically because of the US government's Native American eradication program. The US military provided bullets to hunters. The iconic image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bison_skull_pile-restored.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bison_skull_pile-restored... this was policy. And in fact, the USG still works to limit their population - http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/ http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/ find themselves regularly in conflict with... BLM, I think. Some federal group(s), at any rate.

ryanwaggoner 10y ago

Fewer than 20% of gun owners are active hunters [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if it's as low as 10%, and more than a few of those hunters are pretty casual about gun safety and conservation, in my experience. A little off topic, but...my experience is that many gun owners (maybe most?) are far too casual about gun safety. I'm a 2nd amendment supporter and lean libertarian, BUT I'm also a pragmatist. I think it's absolutely ludicrous that we don't have strong national standards and licensing requirements for acquiring, owning, and carrying firearms. I'm a pilot, and the amount of effort I had to put into being able to fly a small airplane is orders of magnitude greater than that required to walk into a store and walk out with a weapon designed to kill people. I think you should be required to go through initial training, safely store your firearms, and go through refresher training every 2 years. At minimum. 1. http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/us-gun-owners-outnumbered-hunters-5-1-2011 http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/us-gun-owners-outnumbere...

zepto 10y ago
Whilst I agree with you about the need for people to know gun safety rules, your requirements seem unrealistically reactive. Most gun owners in the US barely if ever shoot their guns, and the number of accidents or deaths that result from unsafe handling is negligible. You would save more lives by requiring training every 2 years for an license to buy aspirin.
- 542458 10y ago
  For anybody else curious about actual numbers... In 2013 it was 505 deaths due to negligent handling (vs 11,208 homicides and 21,175 suicides). I'm not able to find any numbers for accidental Aspirin overdose specifically. NSAID use in general kills about 16,500 people yearly, but that number includes drugs other than Aspirin and doesn't differentiate accidental overdose vs suicides or complications from use as prescribed.
  - zepto 10y ago
    Those numbers suggest that the two problems are in very much the same ballpark. Conservative estimates suggest that 1 in 3 Americans own guns. A mandatory training every other year would be an approx $2Bn program annually. (Based on $50 per person per class including administration, which seems very conservative to me) It seems obvious that if you had $2Bn per year to spend on preventing avoidable deaths, this would be an extremely low priority.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

scaryspooky 10y ago

You cannot be an environmentalist and also for prevention of forest fires, however given the mismanagement of the forests we're now in a very dangerous situation where the forests are too dense and fires will be too hot so recovery from a fire will take a very long time instead of being the productive and beneficial activity that forest fires once were.

TheGirondin 10y ago

This is due in large part to the Colbert effect. The only source for what liberals believe conservatives think comes from sources like Colbert or Stewart. It's part of a much broader issue that has lead to the "the sky is falling," "fascism is just around the corner" hysteria since Trump won.

tasty_freeze 10y ago
You are making the same mistake. One poster here says they are surprised that all gun owners aren't like Ted Nugent. You blame it on the "Colbert Effect". Where do you get your impression that liberals all think that the poster you are responding to?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

gojiberry 10y ago

I just don't get how killing another living being can be a sport?