Monday, October 14, 2024

A Great Article about Hunting and Gun Deaths that defies easy explanations

 Let me start by saying this. The headline here does not do the article justice. The article itself is written by a criminologist who is also a hunter.

He sees through both eyes as a hunter and researcher. And as hunting has reduced in popularity, gun ownership, and mass shootings have gone up. He is from Maine, where gun ownership is very high, but gun violence is not. In many ways, he attributes this dichotomy partly to the training hunters must undergo to get a license. He also attributes part of it to stupid ass laws. Take this for instance:

Second, there are laws that apply to hunting that do not apply to other types of gun carrying. For example, in Maine, when driving the logging roads looking for game, I cannot have a weapon loaded in my vehicle. If we spot a partridge, we must stop the vehicle, step outside of it, load, and then fire. The purpose of this regulation is, of course, to promote safety, a concept that is of utmost concern for hunters. But if you are carrying a gun for nonhunting purposes? Then it’s fine to have it loaded in your car. It’s literally written into the legislation on guns and vehicles in Maine. So if you want to shoot a deer, you have to be safe about it. If you want to shoot a person, throw caution to the wind.

He rejects the easy arguments that color both sides of the debate. He agrees that guns don't kill people, people do - but having a means of killing people easily at your disposal is not a good thing. He has investigated the idea that killing animals makes it easier to kill people, and debunks it.

He has gone to great lengths to find a correlation between gun access and gun violence, but there is not a clear correlation at all, possibly due to the widespread ownership of guns for self-defense vs. hunting vs. illegal use. There might be a correlation between gun violence and handgun ownership, but there is no good way to measure this because gun ownership is not broken down that way.

I THINK - changing from commenting on this to commenting about gun violence - that registration and insurance might be helpful to change this story in this country. Guns can kill people, and cars can kill people. Everyone has to take driver's ed to get a license. And everyone has to have insurance to drive. The same process could be used for guns. 

True, not everyone will follow the rules here, but not everyone follows the rules about cars. It still makes society work better than allowing driver's licenses and ownership to anyone who can reach the pedals.

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