Not something I think the Brady Campaign wants to see in a major media outlet — an article that laments not enough kids like to hunt and shoot because of video games, and because they never get exposed to shooting sports. Of course, as bloggers have pointed out before, video game exposure can be as much an opportunity as a curse.
7 thoughts on “Too Few Kids With Guns”
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On the contrary, I think they’re delighted that it says the outdoor sports are becoming marginalized as an old-folks’ passtime.
Hunting and fishing are struggling because when they came under strong criticism, hunters and anglers withdrew from the culture fight, kept their heads down and tried to keep to themselves.
Hunters should have done like…for lack of a better term, “gun nuts” did, and fought back, gun nuts took an evangelical approach to their interests and brought many people into their shooting sports and political activism. They’re winning the culture fight (everyone makes an AR now!), and now the political fight. Hunters are the ones struggling now because they ceded the cultural battlefield to their critics, and it threatens the sport and tradition in a major way.
If it wasn’t for my friends in high school I would have never been exposed to guns. My grandpa was a gun nut and my dad not at all (his interests/skills lie elsewhere).
The generational skipping is what will kill off hunting and fishing.
I kind of want to learn to hunt. Except that I don’t have the gear or the desire to eat that which I hunt right now; and I wouldn’t feel right trophy hunting. I have killed and eaten chicken, and in fishing have always practiced catch-and-release.
I’m fairly interested in developing the skills to try deer hunting some time; interested in it mainly as a high-stakes, practical marksmanship problem. I do have some of the same moral qualms as Ian; fortunately, I like venison/beef burgers and there’s a local group that will donate the rest of your deer to needy families. So yeah, I ought to do it.
But you know what thought REALLY floats my boat deep down? Freaking feral hog hunting. In the southern U.S. With a big magnum revolver. They’re nasty, harmful pests, so you can feel like a good guy stalking them. And talk about adrenaline!
I always read the hog-huntin’ threads on the various handgun boards. Especially when there’s pics.
Ian.
What gun for chicken?
Pointer or retriever?
Chicken camo, or
chicken blind?
Recipes?
Clue a brother in. And your story had better not start, “No chickenshit…there I was…”
See you at chicken camp!
I caught it with my bare hands, actually (run down in a fenced enclosure – I must have been 12 or 13 at most, and thought it was great fun). Boy scout “camp-out” on the scoutmaster’s farm. Killed with a hatchet (thus proving the adage about headless chickens); and cooked over a fire.