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- cross-posted to:
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For decades, the image of gun ownership in America was white, rural and Republican, but that’s been changing, according to gun clubs, trainers, Second Amendment advocates and academic researchers.
They say more liberals, people of color and LGBTQ folks have been buying guns for years and particularly since Trump’s reelection in 2024. This story was based on more than 30 interviews. David Phillips is on the training team of the Liberal Gun Club, which has chapters in more than 30 states and provides a haven for liberals to train and learn about guns. He says club membership has grown from 2,700 in November to 4,500 today. Requests for training, he says, have quintupled.
“The concern is about the supporters of the right-wing who feel that they have been given permission to run roughshod at least, if not commit outright violence against people they don’t like,” Phillips says.
A reminder to all those who want to buy a gun for protection, get training and not just shooting at paper.
I can tell you that even just being a hunter, you’re reaction to a situation that will involve potentially taking a life, you’re not going to react the way you think you will when adrenaline is pumping through you.
You saying we should practice shooting at living humans? I’m not really sure what you’re implying here…
There are many exercises to help train your reactions during actual emergencies that don’t involve firing live ammunition at real people. Im more familiar with martial arts than firearms, but sparring works.
Sparring…with guns?
Shooting competitions can be useful. Especially something like a 3-gun match where you’re moving around, reloading, changing weapons, have an accuracy penalty, and are running against a clock.
But the biggest problem there is money. Ammo is reaaly expensive these days, and 3-gun will use up a LOT of it.
Yeah, I don’t wanna go through the proper training to actually be a useful gun carrying person. I also don’t want to carry a gun. Between those two things, I haven’t bought one. If I weren’t a straight I might have to reconsider.
What if it’s a hunting trip to hunt predator animals instead of prey animals?
Wouldn’t that be better training because the creature can fight back?
That depends. What kind of firearms training has the predator animal received and are they equally armed? Otherwise its bringing claws to a gun fight.
The hunter can always just bring humanity’s most iconic weapon to practice better: the spear.
If you are feeling fancy, a bow.
If you wanna go on a humanity fuck yeah trip, a gun.
There’s a lot of choices. What matters is that they develop a proper response in the face of danger and avoid freezing.
Hunting predators has caused massive ecological harm in the US.
Hunt hogs. They’re invasive and cause massive damage ecologically and economically. They can also fuck you up.
Hunting feral hogs is outdated management practice. It interferes with centralized operations that combat the feral hogs, but also educates the hog populations to be better at evading capture. Drop cages with baiting and cameras are the most effective management practice. Seconded by drones that use infrared to find sounders of hogs, those details are send to a helicopter with a sharpshooter to take out the whole sounder.
TL; DR: hunting feral hogs makes smart hogs and only makes thr problem of controlling and reducing population worse.
This isn’t entirely true… extermination of apex predators has brought environmental damage. Sustainable hunting is actually a net positive, brings additional revenue to the area and helps population dynamics. Specifically things like how they hunt African Lions today. The pick sick or old animals, it has high barrier to entry so it’s not something you do often and most of the money goes back into conservation and local developing economies.
So you’re saying thousands of people people who aren’t members of the rich, white, cis, straight Republican, male ruling class should spend 200 grand each to hunt old apex predators?