Will this do…?
The USA still has a large populace that lives rural and hunts local wild animals as a part of their normal daily diet.
People that live in highly urbanized crowded countries have a hard time wrapping their mind around just how much open space with very few humans we have here.
As a percentage of the US populace, the rural crowd isn’t huge; maybe 25%. That’s still ~80+M people. On the order of the entire population of UK, France, or even Germany.
The population of a small country like the Netherlands or Belgium fits neatly in one of our bigger cities & associated suburbs.
This may well be the case but does it really justify that everybody has the right to own a gun independently of their mental sanity? I mean the really serious gun problems in the US do not come from people hunting in rural areas.
I’m not a fan at all of US gun “policy”.
My point was only and entirely that it seemed you assumed that “woman with gun getting food” always meant Mom carrying a pistol in the grocery store, not ever her out hunting deer or squirrels or whatever.
I will grant that right now this instant minute as I type this sentence there are probably more American women in grocery stores with pistols than there are in the woods with rifles. But the mix isn’t 100% / 0% either.
Quite a frightening specimen…
I don’t care if you brine that in milk for a week and then slow cook it in butter.
If you touch that meat with your tongue, you’ll be vomiting clear through to 2026.
You might be used to this, for me this is a disturbing idea.
I don’t doubt it’s disturbing to you. That’s completely reasonable starting from where you are.
But starting from where most sensible Americans are it looks more like this:
- I’m not happy about it. I’d reverse it if I could. But I accept that we’re stuck with it until we get a completely new governmental system and probably a new set of citizens to go along with it. Right now I’d rather avoid all that disruption. Sigh.
Oh well, good luck with that, my best wishes be with you.
Why would you think I was speaking of Europe?
Europe is too urbanized for such an issue.
Benelux is, maybe, but there’s quite a lot of rural territory in Europe, including bears, esp. Eastern Europe.
I have no idea how well LouMa does or does not know the US, but—
This also does not seem to be describing the United States. It looks like, in 2024, there were 3,263 moose harvested, which is 1/227th of a moose for each Alaskan, presuming that no out-of-stater took any. Do you mean that they depend on the meat itself, or on the revenue from tag sales, or..?
Sure, I guess, but only on field trips to the Denver Zoo. Brown bears do not live in Colorado (or in Virginia, for that matter). Detailed statistics are available in the media kit from Colorado Parks and Wildlife at the bottom of this page. There were 160 bear sightings in Area 5 (roughly, the Denver Metro area), essentially all of them in Douglas and Jefferson Counties.
Here I have created a map indexing bear sightings to county population, which Discourse will not allow me to embed, naturally. Pitkin and Huerfano counties are the most active, at 0.015 and 0.014 sightings per person, respectively. The average for counties that reported any bear sightings at all is 0.00059 per person. That does not include the 22 counties, covering 36% of the state’s population, that did not report any sightings, including Denver, Arapahoe, Adams, and Broomfield counties.
I lived on the Front Range for more than a decade, spent a lot of time outdoors, and encountered a black bear exactly once, when I was camping out in the Roosevelt. I’m sure there are people in Colorado who see bears more often, but “I’m not saying that any of this is a regular daily occurrence” is a significant understatement. What you are describing is also not “life here” or something the vast majority of Coloradans (or Americans) need to be taught to survive, unless this is a bit that just went over my head.
For a bit more context on firearms and bears:
For our rather long discussion about it. And here in Colorado Springs between my wife and her mother, two experiences with in-city black bears in the last ten years.
But see also my post where I mentioned how an individual in more rural Colorado was indeed killed by a bear, though it was the first time in 22 years it had happened in that area.
To the greater theme though, I think the commonness of rural hunting for primary food purposes has declined dramatically over the generations in much of the nation. I own a large number of firearms (almost all inherited/on perpetual loan from my father-in-law) due to that change.
The firearms included 3 .22 rifles, from his parents generation, including his mother’s varmint gun. Several others from siblings who didn’t have kids, or don’t have kids that have any firearm experience. My wife and I target shoot (well, not since circumstances just pre-Covid spiked prices), and had taken handgun safety courses, so we have nearly three generations of inherited guns.
Between you, me and the tree, I’ll properly dispose of 80% or more of them when they don’t have to be kept for “sentimental” value.
Back to the origination of the thread though - if the reported suspect is confirmed to be guilty, we’re dealing with a subset of American gun ownership that is extremely challenging from the point of view of gun control changes: military veterans. There is a widely held belief that former military and LEO should automatically be exempt from the additional training/safety requirements that civilians need in some jurisdictions to own or conceal-carry a firearm.
They are the ones expected to be the most responsible, trained, and likely to use a personal firearm for good reasons. And for the majority, it’s probably correct - I mean, I have a CCW in Colorado, and the training (including live practice) and licensing was not particularly long, onerous or expensive [not cheap though either]. But especially in light of diminishing funding and availability for the VA, not to mention a far-too-ignored degree of trauma for vets, it worries me from time to time.
I’m not excusing the shooter for his actions, far from it. But most of the reporting from around the incident shows that it was known in the community he was deeply troubled, but no one seemed able to help him. Again, I worry about how many others there are just like him with the skills and weapons stewing in physical or mental distress who could do the same with little to no notice.
Oh, yes, that’s totally fair—there are larger towns where it’s more common (Boulder, too, though I never saw any when I was at school). I got married in the Springs last year and while we only saw deer, the owner of the house we Vrboed said the previous guests had a black bear come into the yard. Conversely my mom has lived in the outskirts of Aurora for almost 30 years and never seen so much as a coyote in the neighborhood, though I’m sure they’re there.
This also. And maybe if you live in some combination of “suburban, but rural enough to see deer sometimes”/“area that was urbanized fairly recently”/“area with a libertarian streak” it’s tempting to look outside and think: well, I don’t have to hunt for food or fend off wildlife, but I’m sure my neighbors do.
Hence the gulf between the perception of “in Alaska most families depend upon moose meat to get through the winter” and the reality of “some Alaskans eat moose in the winter,” or “grizzlies are spotted in Denver on the regular” and “black bears rummage through trash in Boulder and El Paso counties on the regular.” But as someone who moved from Colorado to Europe, I’m reacting to the idea that Europeans don’t understand the reality of American life (i.e., the remainder of this post is directed at you @ParallelLines).
Making the case for “how hunters are positioned to address food insecurity,” the “Wildlife Management Institute” cites the NRA as saying that “103 million pounds of harvested meat” are shared with “family, friends, or others outside their immediate households,” or about 47,000 metric tons, with each deer providing up to 50 lbs (23 kilos) of meat.
The National Deer Association says that 5.9 million deer were taken over the 2021-2022 season, so that’s an upper bound of 133,000 metric tons, or 400 grams per American, per year. On the one hand, the average American consumes 124 kilos of meat per year. I could say that the wild game harvest is a rounding error. On the other: in Germany, the average German consumes 400 grams of game meat per year. Hunting in Germany provides 27,000 tons of meat per year, or 325 grams per German.
Closing the tangent to bring it back: there are wild boar in the Grunewald here in Berlin (for that matter, there are wolves in the surrounding countryside). By both raw numbers and as a percent of total population, four or five times more EU citizens live in brown bear country than Americans do—Finland and Estonia, the northern half of Sweden, and now Latvia.
All the same, the average European and the average American have the same statistical likelihood of encountering a dangerous wild animal, and the same need to be “prepared” for it. The US is significantly more urbanized than the EU as a whole, and more urbanized than all but 7 of its individual countries. I get the romantic ideal. My parents were the children of rural farmers. I grew up exposed to that milieu, too.
But, as someone who owned and shot firearms growing up, and who left them (and a shitty old truck!) behind when I moved to a big city in Germany, I reject the idea that there is something unique to the lived American experience—as opposed to the American fantasy or aspiration—that Europeans don’t understand. In particular, “you really don’t get America, a country where Pa carries a shotgun to fend off grizzlies and hunt moose so that we may survive the winter hunger that befell us after the meager harvest did fail this bleak autumn past,” is extremely silly.
Same—see also the Lewiston shooter, two years ago, who seems to have had traumatic brain injuries consequent to repeated low-level concussive exposure as a hand grenade instructor. I don’t know what the conclusions are likely to be in this case, of course.
Thank you for offering a somewhat different perspective on the necessity of carrying weapons in the USA in view of the threat posed by wild animals and the procurement of food. I have been to the US, but I have not lived there for any length of time, and I have never been to Alaska. I do not know whether @TruCelt has firsthand knowledge of Europe. In any case, they argue that Americans urgently need their weapons for defense and food procurement, and that Europeans naturally have no idea why it is impossible to live in the US without weapons. Be that as it may, I am convinced that the gun policy in the US poses a considerable threat to society, especially the fact that weapons are very easily available to everyone, including very young people and the mentally ill. I cannot understand how anyone can argue that a society should be armed to the teeth. As a European, it’s easy to be portrayed as naive in this regard. I have never held a weapon in my hand and never will. Unfortunately, we also have weapons in our country, both in shooting clubs (strictly regulated) and illegally among criminals. I will never understand why Americans have such an emotional relationship with weapons. I can understand why the gun lobby advocates gun ownership, but I don’t understand why the population goes along with it. In other words, TruCelt’s somewhat folkloric portrayal of life in the US is ultimately an apology for gun ownership and use. Obviously this is their position, so be it.
Did you mean black bear? It would be extremely unusual to see a brown bear that far east. Black bears are common up and down the east coast near major urban areas, as are coyotes.
Quite a few of us Americans agree with this. I’m on the extreme anti-gun end of American viewpoints; I’d like to see America’s rules change a bit more to those in place in Europe. But I’m not alone. It’s just that views like mine and yours have no real place in American gun discourse.
(emphasis mine) I have no problem with former military and LEOs not having to re-train to get a conceal-carry license, but damnit, they sure as hell need to be subject to the same safety rules (storage / safe / trigger lock) as anyone else.
Most people don’t know that Black Bears can be brown, and “Brown Bears” is a synonym for Grizzley Bears. Yeah, you ain’t gonna see a Grizzley bear in DC, but you might see a brown Black bear.
I’d argue that former military police maybe ought to be exempt from the various training requirements for concealed carry. Maybe.
But not others. Some infantryman has not really been trained in the laws around civilian firearms. If they served in a combat zone they may have a very different idea of when and how much force is appropriate than a trained CCW civilian will. But they will be judged in civilian court by civilian standards. Some military member who qualified with a rifle and / or pistol during initial training and never touched a firearm during the remainder of their time in the service is in even worse shape. They got taught the minimum, and that was long ago in a very different context from today.
About the only part of firearms & CCW training that (maybe) can be skipped is basic marksmanship and basic firearm handling safety. Everything else about civil use of firearms, and especially handguns, is foreign to military practice.
And much less with the new government I suppose. And then…many pro lifers are gun advocates. What a mess!