I mean, if you hunt deer, pheasant, small game, target shoot, and have a handgun or two for home defense, that’s already 6ish guns right there. If you have any heirlooms or collector items that are firearms, that’s a few more. I don’t have 12 guns, but I don’t have a hard time picturing why someone might, especially an entire family who hunts and does outdoorsy things. Then again I live in the western US and outdoor recreation is huge here.
Though if you don’t have any sense of responsibility, you shouldn’t have any guns either. If anyone disagrees with that, I don’t know if logic can reach them!
We don’t have walkable cities, and in rural areas infrastructure may be so underwhelming that shooting stuff might be the best you can hope for excitement.
(Fortunately it’s usually in a non harmful way like target shooting or plinking).
“Hunters have been destroying the environment for centuries, and now the environment is fucked up, so the solution is more hunting!”
Really a copy paste of the “against mass shootings, we need to give more weapons to people so they can shoot the shooters”, an argument that is absurd to everyone outside of the US, and to anyone in the US who has a brain.
Yeah I spent the better part of my adulthood working to preserve lands with the park service.
Over population happens it’s an issue. Some parks like Yellowstone have been able to reintroduce wolves. It was great. Other parks actually host hunts. However sometimes when populations get out of control people have to go and cull species. Culling is most wasteful imo, and expensive for public lands
I’m sorry these are the facts. Ecology doesn’t really care how you feel about it.
Also recrational hunting didn’t cause predators to go extinct. That was a direct action of the government paying bounties to kill North America’s natural predators. Wolves would have still been killed by farmers, but the hunting was driven by the government then.
Personally I prefer reintroduction of predators. The issue is it gets political fast and every farmer within 500 miles of a planned reintroduction calls congress and lobbyists get involved. When that option is gone, managed hunting becomes the most effective in terms of practically and cost to manage populations.
Please stop comparing scientifically backed land management to conservative dog whistles
Yeah, just like people try to prevent forest fires because they feel like it’s an environmental problem, and then researchers are suggesting that preventing forest fires completely actually causes them to be worse and more frequent.
Maybe at some point the idea that when an environmental problem arises, you need to completely take control over it, is not such a good idea. And as you said, reintroducing predators that have been exterminated by hunters (whether it was from a government incentive or not doesn’t really change who did it) is probably the best solution that we have available, but it’s not done because fuckers keep on thinking that mass killing is an alternative solution. If people stopped loving hunters so much, the idea of “culling” or mass murdering a species would not be seen as a possibility, and everyone would shut up about reintroducing predators.
Justifying hunting is never, in no shape or form, helping anything. It just makes things worse for everyone (except the hunters, that are enjoying their lives of murder-hobos)
Environments are designed for forest fires. They need dire to function. Which is why there are intensive control burn programs.
The issue is before we began trying to let our forests burn properly people spent decades not burning the forests and trying to stop every fire immediately. This led to way too much fuel being available and combined with climate and you get fires that are outside of what they should be naturally. Hopefully we can continue to correct to the point where we can let fires burn naturally. Sometimes people struggle to understand that we’ve been shaping the environment for decades and it’s going to take decades of work to fix. Just walking away would not have the intended result.
Anyway back to the need to cull or manage hunts, you clearly have no idea the ecological issues overpopulation causes. When populations get out of control you can have an environment that becomes completely overgrazed. This is a disaster for the plant communities, and causes ripple effects throughout the whole ecosystem. Leading to the extinction of threatened plant and animal species and a loss of biodiversity.
Naturally it would not get to that point. We should reintroduce predators. Until then it is absolutely necessary to cull some species. I’d much rather people go and kill a couple hundred deer every few years (most parks do not do yearly hunts) than to lose vulnerable species.
And like I said it’s not the hunters preventing predator reintroduction it’s primarily ranchers with a helping hand from NIMBYs. Truthfully I’ve never heard a case of hunters saying anything at all about reintroduction.
On that note - I know California gets a lot of deserved flak for its gun laws, but do you think the mandatory training and safety certification before purchase is a good idea for more states to adopt? (After you complete the training you get a renewable 5 year license to buy guns within)
There is no training required to buy guns in CA. You have to get a firearm safety certificate (FSC), which requires passing a multiple choice test, but no training. I haven’t seen this test myself (I’m not a gun person) but I’ve heard it described as basically trivial, that anyone with some common sense could pass it with no study whatsoever. That sounds much easier than the multiple choice test for a drivers license, which millions of people have passed with no formal training. It does (for real) require some study, but you read the DMV drivers’ license booklet, take a few online practice tests, get mom or dad or another driver to explain anything that confuses you, and take the test multiple times if you don’t pass on the first try.
Training (16 hours of professional instruction iirc) is required to get a concealed carry permit in my county, but that’s a different level than just buying guns. I think other counties just give you the permit if you don’t have obvious issues preventing them.
Ah. When I was reading it on calgov it seemed like it would be more in depth. I guess it does make more sense for a CCW since a person will be carrying it on their person more often.
I do want to train and learn best practices if/when I own a gun though. Don’t want to be “that guy” when out hunting or at a range.
California isn’t real dude. It’s an illusion The Man made up to have us think school might be fun and that your cool musician uncle would have a full head of hair, sold to us by shysters like Danny House and Zache Gosselaar-Bel.
I think it’s a good idea in a stable society. This will be a hot take so please judge my ideas freely, but personally, I think gun laws only mask the fact that the American people and the American system are broken.
Instead of fixing the problems with America, the Democrats point at the guns. Instead of fixing the problems, Republicans blame the fact that we have turned against God or some nebulous spectre of communism that still haunts them decades later. Training laws would probably work in a country that has legitimacy, rule of law, some degree of social cohesion, and an economic safety net. The police in America aren’t even legally required to protect you.
Any politician who wants a hope of steering America to safer seas needs to only focus on 80/20 issues where almost everyone agrees and steer clear of anything divisive until the common sense fixes are done. My neighbors in Colorado will Vote for 420 different progressive causes, but the Democrat/Republican split isn’t representative of our opinions. Every year we fight the same battles instead of looking for the common ground that might help people want to shoot each other less and help those who do get help faster and with much less friction.
I generally agree with the principle of what you’re saying in a philosophical sense. However, there are also some empirical truths to contend with. People typically don’t like radical change, people are prone to impulsive errors in judgement (‘system 1 thinking’), an impulsive mistake with guns has far greater implications than an impulsive mistake without guns. So while yes there is a big cultural change that needs to happen, in practice you have to make small changes that marginally lead society towards a better culture.
I mean, if you hunt deer, pheasant, small game, target shoot, and have a handgun or two for home defense, that’s already 6ish guns right there. If you have any heirlooms or collector items that are firearms, that’s a few more. I don’t have 12 guns, but I don’t have a hard time picturing why someone might, especially an entire family who hunts and does outdoorsy things. Then again I live in the western US and outdoor recreation is huge here.
Though if you don’t have any sense of responsibility, you shouldn’t have any guns either. If anyone disagrees with that, I don’t know if logic can reach them!
I don’t mean to sound insensitive to your culture, but there are other activities that can be done outdoors, can you tell your country please?
Even though I’m very glad that I live in a country where guns are heavily restricted, I can’t deny that shooting is kinda fun.
We know. There’s also paintball, and dynamite fishing!
/s
You mean bow hunting like a caveman?
We don’t have walkable cities, and in rural areas infrastructure may be so underwhelming that shooting stuff might be the best you can hope for excitement.
(Fortunately it’s usually in a non harmful way like target shooting or plinking).
Truthfully since most predators have been eliminated many species need population control.
Either the average person hunts or fish and wildlife has to go out there and perform culls.
“Hunters have been destroying the environment for centuries, and now the environment is fucked up, so the solution is more hunting!”
Really a copy paste of the “against mass shootings, we need to give more weapons to people so they can shoot the shooters”, an argument that is absurd to everyone outside of the US, and to anyone in the US who has a brain.
Yeah I spent the better part of my adulthood working to preserve lands with the park service.
Over population happens it’s an issue. Some parks like Yellowstone have been able to reintroduce wolves. It was great. Other parks actually host hunts. However sometimes when populations get out of control people have to go and cull species. Culling is most wasteful imo, and expensive for public lands
I’m sorry these are the facts. Ecology doesn’t really care how you feel about it.
Also recrational hunting didn’t cause predators to go extinct. That was a direct action of the government paying bounties to kill North America’s natural predators. Wolves would have still been killed by farmers, but the hunting was driven by the government then.
Personally I prefer reintroduction of predators. The issue is it gets political fast and every farmer within 500 miles of a planned reintroduction calls congress and lobbyists get involved. When that option is gone, managed hunting becomes the most effective in terms of practically and cost to manage populations.
Please stop comparing scientifically backed land management to conservative dog whistles
Yeah, just like people try to prevent forest fires because they feel like it’s an environmental problem, and then researchers are suggesting that preventing forest fires completely actually causes them to be worse and more frequent.
Maybe at some point the idea that when an environmental problem arises, you need to completely take control over it, is not such a good idea. And as you said, reintroducing predators that have been exterminated by hunters (whether it was from a government incentive or not doesn’t really change who did it) is probably the best solution that we have available, but it’s not done because fuckers keep on thinking that mass killing is an alternative solution. If people stopped loving hunters so much, the idea of “culling” or mass murdering a species would not be seen as a possibility, and everyone would shut up about reintroducing predators.
Justifying hunting is never, in no shape or form, helping anything. It just makes things worse for everyone (except the hunters, that are enjoying their lives of murder-hobos)
Wow talk about false equivalency.
Environments are designed for forest fires. They need dire to function. Which is why there are intensive control burn programs.
The issue is before we began trying to let our forests burn properly people spent decades not burning the forests and trying to stop every fire immediately. This led to way too much fuel being available and combined with climate and you get fires that are outside of what they should be naturally. Hopefully we can continue to correct to the point where we can let fires burn naturally. Sometimes people struggle to understand that we’ve been shaping the environment for decades and it’s going to take decades of work to fix. Just walking away would not have the intended result.
Anyway back to the need to cull or manage hunts, you clearly have no idea the ecological issues overpopulation causes. When populations get out of control you can have an environment that becomes completely overgrazed. This is a disaster for the plant communities, and causes ripple effects throughout the whole ecosystem. Leading to the extinction of threatened plant and animal species and a loss of biodiversity.
Naturally it would not get to that point. We should reintroduce predators. Until then it is absolutely necessary to cull some species. I’d much rather people go and kill a couple hundred deer every few years (most parks do not do yearly hunts) than to lose vulnerable species.
And like I said it’s not the hunters preventing predator reintroduction it’s primarily ranchers with a helping hand from NIMBYs. Truthfully I’ve never heard a case of hunters saying anything at all about reintroduction.
Sometimes the gunshots are just dinner hitting the ground
I do lots of outdoor recreation, mountain biking, swimming, hiking, basketball…
Or did you mean gun-based recreation is huge there?
On that note - I know California gets a lot of deserved flak for its gun laws, but do you think the mandatory training and safety certification before purchase is a good idea for more states to adopt? (After you complete the training you get a renewable 5 year license to buy guns within)
Sounds great, but the class must be free and succinct.
There is no training required to buy guns in CA. You have to get a firearm safety certificate (FSC), which requires passing a multiple choice test, but no training. I haven’t seen this test myself (I’m not a gun person) but I’ve heard it described as basically trivial, that anyone with some common sense could pass it with no study whatsoever. That sounds much easier than the multiple choice test for a drivers license, which millions of people have passed with no formal training. It does (for real) require some study, but you read the DMV drivers’ license booklet, take a few online practice tests, get mom or dad or another driver to explain anything that confuses you, and take the test multiple times if you don’t pass on the first try.
Training (16 hours of professional instruction iirc) is required to get a concealed carry permit in my county, but that’s a different level than just buying guns. I think other counties just give you the permit if you don’t have obvious issues preventing them.
Ah. When I was reading it on calgov it seemed like it would be more in depth. I guess it does make more sense for a CCW since a person will be carrying it on their person more often.
I do want to train and learn best practices if/when I own a gun though. Don’t want to be “that guy” when out hunting or at a range.
You’ve been to California?
California isn’t real dude. It’s an illusion The Man made up to have us think school might be fun and that your cool musician uncle would have a full head of hair, sold to us by shysters like Danny House and Zache Gosselaar-Bel.
deleted by creator
I live here lol
Why are the gun laws bad here? Because they’re so often ignored? :(
I think it’s a good idea in a stable society. This will be a hot take so please judge my ideas freely, but personally, I think gun laws only mask the fact that the American people and the American system are broken.
Instead of fixing the problems with America, the Democrats point at the guns. Instead of fixing the problems, Republicans blame the fact that we have turned against God or some nebulous spectre of communism that still haunts them decades later. Training laws would probably work in a country that has legitimacy, rule of law, some degree of social cohesion, and an economic safety net. The police in America aren’t even legally required to protect you.
Any politician who wants a hope of steering America to safer seas needs to only focus on 80/20 issues where almost everyone agrees and steer clear of anything divisive until the common sense fixes are done. My neighbors in Colorado will Vote for 420 different progressive causes, but the Democrat/Republican split isn’t representative of our opinions. Every year we fight the same battles instead of looking for the common ground that might help people want to shoot each other less and help those who do get help faster and with much less friction.
I generally agree with the principle of what you’re saying in a philosophical sense. However, there are also some empirical truths to contend with. People typically don’t like radical change, people are prone to impulsive errors in judgement (‘system 1 thinking’), an impulsive mistake with guns has far greater implications than an impulsive mistake without guns. So while yes there is a big cultural change that needs to happen, in practice you have to make small changes that marginally lead society towards a better culture.