Flick says he saw some grizzly bears near Pulaski’s candy store!
I think that’s a quite misleading interpretation of what @TruCelt actually said. She was pointing out that some Americans, proportionally more than Europeans, do have significant dependence on firearms for food hunting and predator protection. For most of us Americans, that direct dependence is nonexistent, and @TruCelt is not trying to imply otherwise.
I don’t think anybody in this thread is suggesting that US gun laws can’t be, or shouldn’t be, substantially reformed to reduce gun violence. We’re just making the point that a sweeping European-style ban-all-the-guns-immediately approach would indeed be a significant hardship for some subset of Americans who are using guns responsibly.
It’s a mess indeed. And with the government shut down, with the Orange Toad stopping all SNAP food payments, with the elected MAGAs licking Psychoactive compounds off of his gross back, the people are going to get hungry very soon.
Hungry people do stupid things, which makes the Evil Rump smile.
I once wrote in a different thread how all it takes for a good man to turn into a bad man are hungry children. I still think that that is correct. That said, history paints some vivid lessons taught to The Rich who would say, “Let them eat cake.”
What does that mean? Hunting, maybe? Is there anything else where you could use a gun responsibly? Life without guns is comfortably possible in many countries. Why not in the US?
Yeah, but that was in Indiana.
It means, for example, the food hunting and predator protection that I just mentioned in the post you just replied to. Other responsible uses of guns that wouldn’t count as “significant dependence” on gun ownership include, for instance, target shooting and firearms collecting as hobbies, when pursued in accordance with strict safety protocols.
I don’t think anybody’s arguing that life without guns would be literally impossible in the US. The more meaningful question is, what levels of gun regulation and gun ownership would be optimal in the US? And how should our policies reconcile differing views among Americans about those optimal levels?
No, actually, you are wrong about that. I don’t currently own a gun, and I have never carried one in an urban or suburban context. I absolutely agree that gun control is necessary to our safety. The threat from guns far outweighs the threat from beasts. (especially when you consider the suicide statistics.)
What I’m trying to get across is why that’s so difficult to achieve politically. The fears that weigh on American minds are different.
Thanks to the people who have corrected my misstatements. Ignorance fought. I based my statement about Alaskans and moose meat on an Alaskan company I did business with. In Autumn, the chatter before and after meetings was entirely “Did you get your moose yet?” and where they’d been sighted, who’d got how big a one, and who was helping who with the butchering. Granted, it was a largely Tlingit company, so my view may have been skewed by that. But they were based in Juneau, so not rural.
As for how many times something happens within a given territory or lifetime, the USA is big. It is always easy to make statistics look small. But LouMa was clearly coming from the perspective of a person who had never considered the possibility that when s/he steps outside, there will be dangerous animals to be dealt with. Not every American has met up with one, but I think it’s safe to say we have all seen examples that made us think (YouTube has made this worse.)