Bear attack: Firearms can save a life, but watch where you shoot

Everyone familiar with bears, firearms and Alaska knew that sooner or later the worst was going to happen in urbanized Southcentral -- someone was going to start shooting at a bear and someone else was going to get hit with a stray slug.

Personally, I always figured the accident would come at the Russian River, which the U.S. Forest Service temporarily turned into a grizzly bear-feeding area by trying to make fish cleaning easy for the thousands of anglers who flock there every summer. It was admittedly convenient when the federal agency maintained the fish-cleaning tables, now gone, up and down the river.

But the army of heavily armed anglers that grew because of worries about the bears gathering around those tables to dine on fish carcasses was more than a little alarming. Oddly enough, though, it wasn't at the Russian that the inevitable happened last week.

The wounding of a bystander by a stray bullet, when it finally occurred, took place in the city of Seward. But more on that in a minute.

First there are a couple of things that need to be said about firearms in general, the first being that I'm not going to criticize anyone for packing a firearm anywhere in Alaska. I know better than most their usefulness. I shot a sow grizzly off my foot some years back. I also remember thinking this very clearly before pulling the trigger and putting a bullet in her to keep myself from getting really ripped up:

"Just don't shoot yourself in the foot.''

Firearms are wonderful tools. They can save your life. I can attest to that. They are also potentially dangerous tools like chainsaws, garbage disposals, knives and, maybe most of all, motor vehicles. Some tools require you pay attention all of the time. Some tools require you pay attention most of the time. And some tools require only that you stay out of harm's way when they are running.

Motor vehicles would fit in the first category, though two decades of focus on making them "safer'' has pushed drivers toward the second category. With air bags and seat belts, the modern automobile is such a cocoon of safety that people motor around in it all the time these days thinking they can text on their cell phones instead of paying attention to the road.

As someone who cycles and walks along Alaska's highways, this scares me more than the armed hordes of anglers at the Russian. Instead of preaching at people to wear their seat belts, this state should be starting a movement to take seat belts out of cars to put some risk back in driving so people at least watch the road when they are behind the wheel.

If you really want to worry about a dangerous weapon in America today, worry about the automobile. As safe as cars now are, they remain deadly. In fact, if you are going to be killed by random accident or violence, the odds are more than three times greater someone will do it to you with a motor vehicle than a firearm.

There is a physical reason, too. The deadly surface area of a motor vehicle is huge. The deadly surface area of a bullet is small. It is easier for the latter to miss you than to hit you unless, of course, the person shooting at you is armed with a shotgun with bird shot.

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney, in case anyone has forgotten, got a little too over excited while quail hunting in 2006 and demonstrated how bird shot spreads as it exits the barrel of a shotgun. The edge of the "pattern,'' as it is called, of the shot from the VP's 28-gauge over-under hit the upper torso and face of a Cheney lawyer friend (please, no jokes about whether "lawyer friend'' is a contradiction in terms). The man survived, although an estimated 150 to 200 pellets not much bigger than peppercorns were left in his body.

A standard 28 gauge shotgun shell with size 7 1/2 shot would contain 250 to 275 pellets total, so even in this case a fair bit of the shot -- which spreads out to cover a circle the diameter of 30 to 40 inches, depending on the distance from the barrel -- missed the victim. A slug, which covers an area of less than inch, has an even greater chance of missing.