Well, we already knew for a fact that Crosby doesn’t shoot blanks.
Crosby has the most epic mustache of all time. There is more manliness in one hair on Crosby’s mustache than in Chuck Norris’s entire fucking family lineage.
Yeah, I’ll have to agree with later posters that you are a bit misinformed on urbanization in the United States.
Here’s a quick look at how the Census bureau classifies a territory as “urban”:
Some places that fall under these definitions:
If you check at that link you will notice places such as:
Hanceville, Alabama - pop. 2,951
Kodiak, Alaska - pop. 6,273
Steamboat Springs, Colorado - pop. 9,815
Springfield, Georgia - pop. 2,651
Houlton, Maine - pop. 4178 (and in an area famed for hunting)
Urban doesn’t = towering skyscrapers as far as the eye can see, nor does it = suburbia as far as the eye can see.
Urban Clusters are “smaller” urbanized areas like the cities I listed above, some 30 million Americans live in such places. Some 60 million Americans actually live in places designated as rural which I find surprisingly high given the extremely low bar for classifying an area as “urban.” Most of the urbanites who think cities are quickly covering the landscape would probably not realize that a place like Kodiak, Alaska could even be considered remotely urban.
192 million Americans live in “Urbanized areas” which are areas with a greater population density than the urban clusters I listed above. Here is a list of “urbanized areas.” While some of the largest cities in the country are listed, you’ll still see quite a few cities that most people would think of as “farm land”–especially when we’re talking about the very isolated group of people who have never lived outside of one of the few major metropolitan cities in America.
Finally, while more people are moving away from isolated farms, people are always moving away from the “core” centers of many large metropolitan cities. People are moving more and more to these small cities that either border major metropolitan centers or are just a collection of vaguely suburban locations that have sort of built up around one another. Look at a lot of the larger population counties in the sunbelt, North Carolina, South Carolina, et cetera. A lot of these places don’t have any sort of high-density city centers that people associated with highly urbanized areas, instead it’s more of a clustering of spread out cities.
Some people decry this as urban sprawl, but well over 90% of the land of the United States remains safe from any sort of “urban sprawl”, people don’t realize just how big this country is and just how small your average city is in comparison to all the land around it.
Finally, if people want to go hiking or mountain biking and live in a city like Seattle they have no problem doing so. Even in a major city such a leisure activity is only a quick drive away. It’s pretty easy to pursue hunting as a leisure activity even if you live in the very largest cities in the United States, because even the largest cities have relatively rural counties in close proximity. It isn’t like hunting is something that is done year long every day after work, it’s something you take a few days off to do–so a short drive isn’t really a big hindrance to pursuing it as a hobby.
If I had to guess why hunting has become so unpopular it’s more likely because it is boring than anything else. How many people here have gone hunting and hated it? Just a generation or two after my own most kids, even in the most “backwards” parts of America preferred watching TV or playing video games than standing in the mud for 8 hours immobile and silent hoping a deer might wander through.
Most other activities you can do outdoors, biking, hiking, running, fishing, et cetera can be done in relative comfort and it’s also highly social. Hunting (at least how I do it) is more about silently moving through the woods and finding a spot to wait silently for hours on end without doing anything but keeping a careful watch of your surroundings.
Contrast this to fishing, where you get to sit by a river or lake, with a cooler of beer and get to trade stories with friends. Unless you’re brain dead you don’t drink while hunting and unless you want to alert every game animal for miles in every direction you keep your mouth shut at all times.
If “urbanization” was responsible for the decreasing popularity of hunting we’d also see a decreasing popularity of other activities that rely on “wilderness” areas. But the popularity of hiking, trail running, fishing, and et cetera isn’t declining at all, in fact these things are becoming more popular.
Another thing to keep in mind is most people for whatever reason don’t have a problem with cleaning fish once they catch them, even women. Whereas hunting you have to field dress a 100 + lbs deer in the woods and for whatever reason that is a major turn off for some people who have no problem cutting a fish up. You also have to carry said deer a distance of sometimes over five miles out of the woods. This is only a more laborious task when you start talking about larger game animals like black bear and elk.
Evidently the hunting in the US is different to the hunting here- it’s quite a social activity, but goats, pigs, foxes, rabbits, feral cats/dogs and so on aren’t as skittish as deer and so you can happily chat with your mates, have a few (non-alcoholic) drinks, and generally enjoy being outside at a sensible time of day (rather than 4am in the morning).
FWIW, we usually “spotlight” foxes and hares, which involves a 4WD vehicle, a powerful spotlight, and a rifle (or shotgun). It’s a lot of fun and an effective way to hunt vermin, but I’m told it’s not legal in many parts of the US (so it’s not all bad in this part of the world, at least! ;))
I’ll admit I haven’t read most of the posts in this thread although I’m willing to bet I’ve heard every point made.
My two cents on the OP is that guns will never be banned in this country. Constitutional inertia is a big thing and I don’t think any support of gun control will ever be broad enough to overcome the Second Amendment.
The only way I predict forearms will ever be generally banned in this country is if there is a fundamental change in the government equivalent to rewriting the Constitution or if some future technology like personal force fields renders firearms obsolete and the issue becomes moot.
It depends on the local laws but generally there’s a distinction here between “game” hunting (deer, elk, etc.) and “varmint” hunting for which the rules usually aren’t as strict. For the former, there are any number of restrictions designed to prevent overhunting or “unsportsmanlike” methods, which usually included hunting from a vehicle. In fact in the state of Minnesota, the state game law against having a loaded long arm in the cabin of your vehicle actually supercedes the provisions of the gun carry permit law. So with a carry permit you could legally carry a loaded rifle slung across your back on a public street, but you couldn’t get in your car with it.
Yeah, what you describe is both not typical nor legal in much of the United States. We generally don’t hunt foxes here much at all, and hunting feral cats/dogs or goats would be completely unheard of; you can kill feral creatures that wander onto your property in most States if it is to protect livestock, but that’s not something that is typically done as a leisure activity here.
The closest we have to such social hunting would be things like quail hunting (as an example) and some forms of bear and raccoon hunting in which large groups with lots of dogs run the animals down and eventually tire them out and then the hunters move in for the kill. But that requires owning and maintaining hunting dogs, which most people do not do these days.
There are people here- crazy people, IMHO- who hunt wild pigs with dogs and knives. Most sensible people prefer a .30-30, .303, or a shotgun loaded with solid slug, though.
It wouldn’t make it moot for hunters and target shooters.
Three things need to happen before I would be satified with an all out gun ban in the U.S. One is the invention of a stun gun like Little Nemo mentioned. It would have to stun a target for a long period of time(say 5-10 minutes) and be able to fire multiple rounds without end. If I miss, mild damage to walls, furniture etc. It would have to work in a fashion that allowed for any feasible(and rare) home/property defense. High end ones work like a fully automatic AK without lethal effect. The second would be about two(minmum) consecutive decades of lowering violent crime rates. Third would be constant decline in hunting. I’ll admit, even though I’ve been provided a link earlier, I still know hundreds who hunt regularly. There is no shortage of people I know who take a week or two off in November and I always am eating an elk roast or venison chile at least once every January. Even then there is still quite a number who hunt by bow, who wouldn’t be affected by a gun ban. It would help if law enforcement also carried the mentioned “stun gun” across the nation. Any other ownership of guns for collectors or skeet shooters could be done by permit. I can’t imagine local law enforcement would really care if someone in their jurisdiction cares about the danger of some gun collector possesing a Revolutionary war era musket or a civil war rifle. I’m not educated in the caliber or type of rifle used in skeet shooting, but I think handguns/automatic are probably the bigger issue with the gun control crowd.
For the record I don’t own a gun. I don’t think people who don’t are “weaker” or whatnot. I sleep with a baseball bat next to my bed. I don’t think that makes me paranoid. I have yet to decide if I’ll feel safer with a gun in my home. I oppose gun control because I want my options open.
As far as passing on firearms knowledge to the next generation of firearms owners go, I’ve become the default person for that job, my nephew (6 yr old) and niece (5 yr old) have just started noticing the firearms in my locked display cabinet, and have started asking questions, what kind of gun is that, what does it shoot, how is it different from my other guns…
I treat the firearms like any other potentially dangerous tool that needs to be treated with respect, they’re free to look at them, ask all the questions they want, but before I get the firearm out, they need to be able to recite the Four Rules of gun safety and why they are important…
they also know that if they find an unattended firearm, the first thing they should do is find a responsible adult and notify them, they are not to touch the firearm, an adult will secure it
Logan (my nephew) actually passed a little test I set up for him, I had my H&R single-shot .22 rifle leaning up against a table while I was watching TV, Logan came in, saw the gun, and immediately asked me why the gun was there, and why wasn’t it in the display case, I asked him what would he have done if he came into the room and no one was there by the gun
“I’d find a grown-up and ask them to put the gun away”
He’s learning to respect the firearm as a tool, at some point, when I clear it with my sister, I need to take him out target shooting, set up my .22 spinner target and have him try his hand at the single-shot .22 using primer-only CB Longs, low velocity, quiet ammo, very safe and forgiving for the first-time shooter, heck, I’m even considering picking him up one of those neat little child-sized Chipmunk .22 bolt action rifles
This is the problem with most of the people proposing firearm restrictions- they’ve really got no idea what they’re talking about. I know you’re not anti-gun, Bruce, but saying “I’m not educated in the calibre or type of rifle used in skeet shooting…” makes you look like someone whose opinion is unworthy of notice (skeet shooting is done with a shotgun, not a rifle), especially when the correct information is so easily available via a Google or Wiki search.
That’s not a personal attack on you, it’s just that gun owners are so sick of having people with no knowledge of firearms telling them what to do that it ends up being counter-productive. The Green Party here were in the media a few months ago calling for a ban on “Machine-pistols”, completely overlooking the fact that A) They have been banned in Australia since the 1930s and B) They’re staggeringly, vanishingly rare anyway.
So, The Greens look even stupider than they already are, gun owners roll their eyes at people that have no idea what they’re talking about, and the mutual dislike on both sides gets a wee bit further entrenched.
The Lithgow 1A and 1B rifles seem to be the Australian equivalent of the Chipmunk. They made countless numbers in the '50s and they’re still enormously popular today.
People do that here, too. It’s more common in the southern US than elsewhere. This is mostly because they have substantial populations of feral hogs and a longstanding tradition of hunting larger game with dogs. In the rest of the US, dogs are strictly a birds and/or small game proposition. In Pennsylvania, for example, hunting deer with hounds will get you some serious fines and loss of hunting privileges.