Speaking of hunters v. shooters
Minutes ago, I talked about the divide between hunters and shooters. Maybe this will wake the hunters up:
Installing more metal detectors and locking school doors is all well and good, but it’s not enough. Unless our leaders also examine the hunting culture in rural America—where most mass school shootings take place—and its role in these disturbing incidents, little will change.
That’s right, guys, you’re one of us now.
Update: Kim has more. So does bitter.
Lest ye doubt this is an important issue, check out the anti-gun American Hunters and Shooters Association.
October 20th, 2006 at 10:43 am
Is it true that most school shootings happen in rural areas? Or just that white rural or suburban kids getting shot makes the lead story across the country, while gangbangers having a shootout in an urban school zone hardly even makes the local news?
October 20th, 2006 at 10:46 am
I have a post about this very subject scheduled to go up later. 🙂
October 20th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
This is a serious issue, and the Achilles’ Heel of American gun owners. If gun control groups can lure the hunters to their side (i.e., “divide and conquer”), then we will lose a substantial support element electorally and financially.
It is this division that made the disarmament of the British inevitable. In Great Britain, history shows that the hunters basically sold all shooters down the river, all in the name of “public safety”. As detailed by David Kopel in his exhaustive review of gun control laws around the world, The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy (1992):
“…Home Secretary Douglas Hurd justified the 1988 gun controls as a ‘better balance between the interests of the genuine sportsman and the safety of the public as a whole.’ The gun lobby’s concession that guns are only for sport, and not for defense, helps the government tip the balance against the gun owner. If guns make no positive contribution to personal or public safety, the public’s concerns about safety must override the gun owners’ interest in sports.” (p. 102, italics mine)
October 20th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
Hunters need to wake up and realize these are divide and conqueor tactics. It may even be true that many anti-gunnies would stop short of banning hunting rifles, but that won’t happen. Look at the history of political movements that ended up getting what they want. For this, I point you to MADD, who has largely accomplished much of their original goals of raising awareness and making people and government take drunk driving seriously, but has now morphed into a neo-prohibitionist organization. The same thing will happen within the gun control movement. At each stage, moderates will leave, increasing the zealotry of those remaining, and drawing new zealots into the cause.
Every victory allowed to the gun control movement give them momentum, and it’s why we have to keep fighting them every step of the way, no matter how minor we might think the loss would be.
October 20th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
In Israel, teachers and parents who serve as school aides go armed at all times on school grounds, with semi-automatic weapons. Since this policy was put into effect, terrorist attacks in Israeli schools have dropped to zero. The only recent exception was the tragic case of a group of schoolchildren who were murdered by an Arab gunman as they visited the “Zone of Peace” on the Jordanian border. The Jordanians specifically requested that the Israeli teachers and chaperones leave their weapons behind … which they did.
–Vin Suprynowicz, “Pining for the Peaceful Paradise of an Omnipotent State”
http://www.eoffshore.com/coschl.txt
October 21st, 2006 at 8:35 am
Speaking of products of wishful thinking by the Media, the American Hunters and Shooters Association is a creation of a few wealthy liberals that has trumpeted by the pressies. They represent hunters the way Bill Clinton represents conservative Evangelical Christians; when you dig deeper, there’s no “there” there.
October 23rd, 2006 at 3:59 am
There were shootings in my highschool, 2, actually, while I was attending. The thing? The shooter didn’t hit his target, and got off easy for shooting in a school, and missing his targets, a year later he murdered a girl by shooting her at point blank range, as in barrel to her forhead. (that guy was my best friend when I was in early gradeschool, I hope he dies)
I think that the problem with the hunting culture and school shootings, is that kids in a hunting culture hit their targets.
However, those shootings don’t happen in the north, because, so many scumbag kids are packing anyways. Ironical that the reason there aren’t school shootings in New York and Chicago is because anyone “school shooter” might become a victim of a lowlife gansta wanna be who is packing an illegal weapon, in school.