The congressional response would depend on how generous the National Cougar Association has been to the Republicans. Of course thoughts and prayers would be offered. Otherwise, let’s forget about it and wait for the next cougar attack.
Like drug laws.
If a politically powerful fraction of the country were Wildlife-over-humans protectionists and cougar attacks were as common as gun violence we’d be desensitized to those as well. Affluent people would be relatively unaffected, in fact they’d probably have safe feeding platforms on the wilderness-side of their estates / gated communities, never mind that that was keeping more cougars close to humans.
Sorry @Horatius, I wasn’t as clear as I should have been in my post (it was late and I was full of drugs trying to get some sleep prior to work when the neighbor up the street keeps shooting off mortars).
You were making a point on the good guy vs bad guy claims using the cougar metaphor, and I was trying to say that they’d literally do just that, wipe 'em out because most people don’t accept threats if there are no consequences to them by wiping them out.
Well, I don’t think anyone needs a big Assault Cougar, but having a simple house cat that you conceal carry for self defense is okay.
And don’t give me that, “A large panther makes a fine hunting cat!” nonsense!
If that Cougar was a poster on the Straight Dope Message Board and was saying some real racist stuff but because they’ve been posting here for 20 years the rest of the board members would give it a pass, “I know that Cougar, that Cougar didn’t really mean that” or they would just outright ignore it. Then the Cougar followers would then wait until I said something even remotely controversial and then they would threaten to call the cops about my post.
Man, I was really hoping someone would call me out on mixing up cougars and panthers there. You people are slipping!
I grew up in Highland Park and watched the 4th of July Parade all through the 80s and 90s. When I was in elementary school, a crazy lady tried to set off a fire bomb in my school (unsuccessfully) but she then went on to shoot several kids in nearby Winnetka, one of whom died.
Calls for increased gun control, especially for those with mental health issue, went nowhere. What did change was the schools. Buildings with multiple entrances, including ground floor classrooms with individual doors to the outside, had all their doors locked during the day and a single point of entry for visitors established. At my school they also installed a camera at the main entrance because it’s not directly visible from the front office. They were completely open before, and this was not at all unusual.
When I got to high school, which also had an open campus allowing students to come and go as they pleased (great for walking to lunch, and for those students who smoked), they shut that down after just a year or two. So as usual, nothing was really done to address the problem, only the symptoms. The potential victims were essentially turned into prisoners walled off from the boogeymen outside.
Now schools are even designed by the same architecture firms that specialize prisons, using many of the same strategies. We’ve sacrificed our kids on the altar of gun rights just as we’ve sacrificed them on the altar of happy motoring. Guns and cars have become so normalized and so much a part of the American identity that they’re virtually untouchable, despite how toxic they are. If it were truly an un-fixable problem, then America wouldn’t be so much of an outlier in the statistics as it is.
Like removing the cause.
I do not think fortress schools are an answer, and 100% believe that easy access to guns, especially weapons capable of killing many in short order, are a major part of the problem. I strongly support better gun regulation and better enforcement.
But at some risk of pedantry, are guns the primary cause, or the amplifier?
Returning to the silly analogy of the OP. An initial reaction to cougar attacks might be efforts to kill them all and there would likely be broad support for such action. We’ve tried that with wolves. But it would fail to actually be trying to understand why there had suddenly been so many cougar attacks and to then address that cause. If addessable. If not reducing the amplifier may be all we can do.
Which is the point of the analogy - remove the cause.
Instead the politicians are moving the focus to mental health and red lines. Both are too obscure to have any impact on the problem. Parent/guardian responsibility would do more. Parents enabled some of these shootings. Crimo’s parents seem to have been very involved. How about allowing them to share the consequences.
Until this portion of the gun culture is excised, things will just get worse,
I can’t answer for the entire U.S., but I can provide my personal humble opinion.
Yes. Why are there cougars prowling the streets of Chicago? Did they break out of Lincoln Park? Didn’t anybody see them and call the police? Why weren’t they taken out before mangling 24 people?
Who screwed up so royally as to create the circumstances that allowed this tragedy to occur? They should be sacked!
This makes no sense unless there is some cave full of cougars outside the city that we could retaliate against. In which case, yes, their encroachment onto the city should be considered a provocation and the den should be attacked at once to neutralize the threat.
The cougars which participated in the attack, of course, must die unless there was a gross provocation by the victims.
We are speaking about Illinois… no offense to our dopers from the prairie state.
Yes, materially so. For one, cougars are more conspicuous than guns. Cougars require markedly close physical proximity to inflict injury; guns are distance weapons.
You answered this yourself:
~Max
Actually, cougars are experts at stalking about unseen. There’s a video of a cougar on the loose in Chicago, where a cop is running down the street, and the cougar he’s chasing crosses the path behind him.
Later, the cougar was killed. He was then avenged by parties unknown who burnt down a house. Turned out to be the wrong house, but it’s the thought that counts.
Isn’t the latter a favorite prey of the former?
Excellent example of the the issue posed by the OP. A secretive animal, that was not a threat, is hunted down and killed.
An imagined threat is quickly removed while the real threat is tolerated.
And an excellent username/post combo.
If six people were eaten by cougars in an Illinois suburb, the reaction would be one of stunned horror, because mountain lions generally do not suddenly invade a city and eat people by the half dozen.
A better analogy would be if big predatory felines were eating twenty to thirty thousand Americans EVERY YEAR, year after year, including getting into schools and devouring children.
Just because this is a silly argument anyway …
Cougars are solitary hunters. The only way one cougar would kill/mangle all those people is if they were trapped in a very small space and didn’t try in any way to defend themselves. Like goats in a stall. Their behaviors are exactly like house cats – they have a reflexive attack mode triggered by movement. That’s why they would attack everything that moved that didn’t run away.
In Highland Park, perhaps one person would be pounced on, damaged, and other people would drive the cougar away by screaming and throwing things at it. Since cougars are very shy and avoidant of humans, by far the likeliest scenario is that it would never happen at all.
Even though people are terrified of cougars, after centuries of living in proximity there have only been a few recorded attacks and a handful of deaths.
A cougar attack like you describe would probably involve space aliens impersonating cougars, which indeed would cause a lot of justifiable panic.
The question posed by the OP deals with current US social response to danger, not cougar behavior.
A relevant post upthread gives an example of police reaction even to the presence of a cougar. The animal was immediately killed in response to an imaginary threat.
So, why do we eliminate an imagined threat and do nothing to remove a real threat? Why is the presence of a cougar provocative but the presence of a semi-automatic weapon is not?
BTW: Cougars do not attack reflexively.