Sorry, I misunderstood you I think. I thought you were asking a question about the UK ordinance, when you were actually asking a question about what I thought would be good for the US. My bad!
I just checked the regs for my state and was surprised to see it was legal. Seems stupid to me. I'll have to remember to as my brother The Mighty Hunter about it.
Honestly I was probably wrong about this whole issue and now feel like a bit of an idiot and/or asshole so I'm going to say that I'm very sorry and stop posting now
The biggest problem is no one gives a flip about how the UK is doing it, because it's working for them and that's great, but the terrain and culture differences between the UK and the US are so astronomically different that it honestly can't be cookie-cuttered to the US and gone "YEP HERE YOU GO PROBLEM SOLVED." Again: we're all saying that better gun control is necessary. No one has ever once said anything against it. But to take one country's policies and slap them onto another without any regard to how that country works is just plain silly.
I think it makes sense to have different rules in different parts of the country. It may be hard to come up with the specific rules and there will always be problem edge cases, but the underlying idea is sensible.
Sorry, as I say I was dreadfully uninformed and I literally didn't even know that subsistence firearms hunting was a thing, the image of hunting here is as something the middle and upper class do at the weekends for sport, I literally live half a kilometer away from a farm where they have pheasant shoots, I probably quite literally have no idea what I'm talking about.
@BlackholeKG For what it's worth I still think you're alright. I do think you sort of jumped into this without enough information and maybe started panicking a little, so bowing out is probably a good idea. I hope you have a good rest of the day.
ok, i will put baby powder on my butthurt and all shall be well. tbh i don't carry grudges worth a damn anyhow, i don't have the attention span. anyway, yeah, do you have any idea how long a family of 4 can eat on one full-grown buck caribou? that's upwards of 250 pounds of lean, high-iron red meat. take your kids 'up the lake' during hunting season, shoot your quota, and you just knocked a thousand bucks off your yearly grocery bill. which, in areas with not so great social services, can mean the difference between your kids growing up big and healthy, and your kids ending up weird in the head and missing teeth. outside the big cities, the US is still kind of a third world country. we just don't think about it like that for some reason. duck hunting with my dad is some of my best childhood memories. i learned to handle a bird gun at age 9, and a deer rifle at age 11. i think i was 13 or 14 the first time we took pistols to the range, and it was a test of skill, a sport, just like archery or karate, nothing to do with hypothetically killing someone. firearms really are a part of american culture -- the whole, real, living culture of ordinary people, not the stupid hollywood cowboy shit that people outside the country get to see. so i reckon that's why i got so personally offended by the whole "well you should do like the UK" thing. it'd be like some utah mormon lecturing the french that they should outlaw wine, because alcoholism is bad. :/
guess this could be the hunting thread, unless we've got a lot of bow hunters. i tried it once but couldn't draw anything strong enough to kill a deer. my dad did take a yearling buck whitetail with a compound bow once though. just kind of to see if he could. went back to rifle hunting after that, though, because it felt unmerciful. an arrow doesn't kill the animal fast enough.
brief aside because I saw pepper spray's legality mentioned in ND, I believe, pepper spray is banned, largely because the wind is so high and unpredictable that you are more likely to damage yourself than anyone else but that is just one state's reasoning, so
random related anecdote even though I'm clearly very late: My parents own one shotgun, that they purchased for one purpose; killing rabid animals that get on their property. They used to live in rural north dakota with infants, it was a very real concern and pretty much the only practical protection. tbh i've only ever seen the shotgun /case/ once, they kept it so carefully tucked away where wandering children and the like can find it. I only saw it when we moved houses this last summer. I have shot a couple different guns, my grandparents are rural and I don't know for sure but I would be surprised if they hadn't hunted for sustenance when they were kids if not when they were adults, and my granddad liked taking us to the range and having us try out the guns when we were old enough. He owns a few different calibers or shotguns and pistols, and a family friend who was shooting with us had a semi automatic as well. No clue about my dad's side of the family's gun ownage, but all my cousins go hunting yearly and fishing.. very often, so i'm sure they all own plenty. my dad and his sisters grew up on a farm, so, yeah, really normal to them there.
a lot of suburban and even urban places in the northern us, at least, have real problems with wild animals just derping around like they own the place. bears in the garbage, coyotes eating your cat, moose humping your hatchback. usually you call animal control, but when there's a damn puma sticking its fist-sized paw through the kitchen window trying to get it open wider, it sure is nice to have an option besides "lock yourself in the bathroom and wish you'd bought steel core doors". thinking this probs doesn't happen a lot in the uk.
speaking of suburban wildlife -- i occasionally see white tailed deer just moseying down my street. luka has had many encounters with them while biking his dog. every so often i wish it were not illegal to fire a gun inside city limits, because i could shoot so many groceries from my back porch.
we just moved to an area where there's lots of deer just hanging out in the yet-to-be-developed new development. Also on the edge between city and rural so we probably would be able to shoot some groceries.. actually yeah on the trails i walk around in the woods out back there's a fence that leads to private property that has a hunting roost within sight of the property line so yeah.
yeah, random anecdata, my family doesn't hunt and I was also actually raised, with my sibs, without toy guns- which really just meant that my parents wouldn't buy them for us. my parents don't come from very heavy hunting families at all considering they're from chatfield/Rochester area of Minnesota nonetheless, not only did I manage to make an eraser shooter out of mechanical pencils, my brother handmade rubber band guns for years. even though it wasn't our personal culture, it's a really important part of our wider culture I guess? at some point, my dad taught us how to shoot his rifle because it's a good life skill. it teaches discipline, responsibility, etc. It was also one of the first reasons why I started trying to get stronger, because it was difficult for me to keep it in place long enough when laying on my stomach. it especially teaches "don't point this at anyone. No, not even if you checked it, no, not even if it's broken, no, not even if it's a joke, don't fucking do it", in my case, to the point that I'm very uncomfortable with pointing Toy guns at people So we shot giant cucumbers, empty cans...once or twice we put together little competitions with actual targets, which was fun it's, personally, a very cathartic experience for me to shoot things, because I usually either know what I'm doing or make sure to ask, and in my own history, the people whose guns I use are both very conscientious of my safety and people around us. I don't hunt, because I don't need to, but I like having the feeling of control. I am a huge proponent of gun education, and it consistently amuses me that whenever I talk to my dad about stricter laws around gun education, he starts arguing with me as if I've told him that guns are terrible and ought to be banned. I think both sides have straw men, and I avoid talking about gun control with most people because either I get the "if you want my gun you can take it off my corpse" argument or I get the "guns are horrible creations and people who use them will kill everything I love" argument
oh man yeah, that's probs a nother thing you don't see a lot of in europe -- hunting blinds and roosts on people's property. drive down a dirt road in minnesota in the fall and look sharp, you'll see them in the woodlots between farms. high school kids will camp up there mornings after harvest and shoot birds and deer that come to glean the fields. idk, there's a kind of primal joy in presenting your mom with a fat duck to cook for dinner. my inner caveman gets all snuggly about it.
We live in a part of Georgia that has had its native cat population restoring itself in spite of being all moved out a hundred years ago. Cats that can weigh over a hundred pounds and would think Baby looks like a nice easy snack (she wouldn't be, but cats are not good at guessing that sort of thing). Bears have damaged our back porch every year since we moved in. The only reason we don't have guns is that it's a condition of me & Baby's guardianships. No guns in the house, even under lock and key. We're too likely to find a way to get to them - nothing is totally secure - and we have serious problems with mood control (we have none). Not likely we would ever attack someone, but enough risk that the court felt it was better for all if the risk wasn't there at all. We DO have tasers for the cats - with very strenuous rules not to use on bears - for those we have trees they can't climb but we can (so can cats, hence the tasers). And the local deer seem to have been informed that there are no guns - they come around often at breeding time.
I get very frustrated at how much the gun control thing has become divorced from practicality. Like the fuss about "military style weapons". The cosmetic appearance of a gun has nothing to do with its lethality. "Assault weapon" bans mostly are dealing with cosmetic features. Nobody is allowed to sell full-auto weapons to civilians. In general, running around trying to ban various types of rifle is pointless; high-90s percentile of firearm homicides are with pistols, with shotguns second and rifles a distant third. Also, it's always noticeable that the only firearms bans that get much traction in the US is ones that try to keep firearms away from the poor.
