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Think a gun makes you safer around Alaska bears? Think again.Think you're safer with a gun around bears, as many Alaskans do? Maybe you'd better think again. The news out of Montana on Friday was that 39-year-old Steve Stevenson of Winnemucca, Nev., was not killed by the grizzly bear that attacked him near the Montana-Idaho border on Sept. 16. He died, authorities say, from a single gunshot to the chest. An autopsy discovered the bullet, fired by a hunting companion who was trying to save Stevenson from the bear. How well do your friends shoot? Better yet, how well do your friends shoot in stressful, combat-type situations? Stevenson's hunting companion was a 20-year-old friend from Winnemucca. I don't know that I've met many 20-year-olds to whom I'd trust my life in a situation like this, and I say that -- let it be clear -- as someone who was attacked by a grizzly bear, clawed in the face and bitten in the leg, and who in the end shot the bear off his leg. I might be a whole lot uglier than I am now if not for a gun. I might even be dead. I am not embarrassed to say I like guns, either. Earlier this summer, I went to check on the remains of a full-grown moose that grizzly bears had killed up the valley from my Anchorage home. The bears were camped out in the middle of a trail and I packed a short-barreled shotgun with an extended magazine stuffed with slugs. It is a weapon well designed for killing bears. I have no doubts about the dangers bears can pose, or what it takes to kill one that's all pumped up on adrenaline. Neither do I have much doubt about my shooting skills. I grew up with firearms. I shot them regularly and still do, especially the shotgun, especially this time of year. While tromping through the marsh the other day, I got to contemplating just what a great fall it has been. I've hit about 90 percent of all the waterfowl I've shot at, and most of the missed shots were difficult shots, sometimes very difficult shots at range. Am I confident I could shoot a bear off a friend if I had to do so without hitting him or her? Yes. Am I confident all of my friends are capable of this? No. A couple, yes. Most of them, no. Shooting is like any other skill. You've got to do a lot of it to get good at it, and it's best if you start young because if you start late you need to practice even more. Most of the people I know either didn't start young or didn't, and don't, practice enough. They never quite got to that point where they act as if the gun was an extension of their body, and if you're going to be using a firearm in stressful situations -- any stressful situations -- this is the skill level you want and need. You ought to be as comfortable with your weapon as a four-star chef is with a frying pan. If this is not the case, you might want to leave the gun at home. If this is not the case for your friends, you might want to tell them to leave the gun home, or bring some pepper spray in case they need to try to get a bear off you. Pepper spray has a good track record for driving off bears. No one has, as yet, been killed using it. And it's unlikely you could kill someone else by using it. Guns are wonderful tools, but only in the hands of people well-schooled in their use. In the hands of the unschooled, they are as dangerous as a chainsaw run by a fool. They can kill or maim the user or those around the user. The death of Stevenson ought to make everyone Alaskan stop and think seriously. Guns aren't foolproof protection. Another Alaskan, 65-year-old Donald "Skip" Sanford of Anchorage, was mauled by a bear just this week. He had a gun. It didn't help. There are a couple things worth noting about the attack: Though Sanford managed to shoot the bear, it still mauled him. He survived only because the bear later cut off the attack. Most bears do. Scientist Tom Smith documented 515 bear attacks in Alaska involving brown/grizzly, black and polar bears between 1900 and 2004. Ninety-five percent of the people involved survived.
The point I get from this is that pepper spray is a safer and more effective deterrent to bear attack than a gun- no matter who is shooting it. Unless, of course, you have your wife along in which case her incessant screeching scream is the best repellent known to man... Kind of reminds me of the debate over seatbelts. Always someone in the crowd whose cousin's brother in law's ex-wife's niece's friend who was "killed by her seatbelt in a crash". Can it happen? Sure... it's "possible". I'm all for training. Had alot when I worked in law enforcement, and did even more when I was shooting competitively. I train yearly for hunting now, plus shooting "for fun" during the rest of the year. I don't feel too threatened anyway about grizzly bears because they're not usually aggressive toward people. Leave them alone, they leave you alone, usually. I'm all for pepper spray too... love the stuff. Used it much more often working in law enforcement than my firearm. Used to call it "karate in a can"... But in a stiff wind it's not worth spit. And in law enforcement when lethal force is called for, you use it. When non-lethal force is called for, you don't use lethal force. When a bear is charging you, the choice is your own. I'd go with the bear spray, if the wind isn't blowing and I have time. If the wind is blowing, I'll take the gun every time. If I am in a tent, pepper spray is worse than useless. I'll take the gun every time. Truth be known, I like the idea of not having to kill a bear because I got too close, didn't make enough noise... no hide and skull to salvage. Frankly, I like seeing bears and don't have a problem with them. I carry bear spray and a firearm usually... If I am camping, I sleep with the firearm, and keep anything that even might smell like food with the food... not in the tent. I like seeing them, I don't want one sitting in my lap. For the reasons in the article I am pretty sure most of the people I ever have seen brandishing a gun on a trail or fishing hole, supposedly to protect their family against bears, are the ones I wish were not armed. With the exception of professionals, there is only one person I trust with a gun - me. Everyone else should be required to pass a test. This is a great illustration of why one should be trained and continually practice whatever defensive plan, armed or unarmed, one might choose for bears or people or any other situation, but this isn't a great argument against carrying a gun. The plural of anecdote is not data. Bear maulings are uncommon, even among people who are in bear country all the time. (Though, yes, those in bear country a lot usually have better skills to avoid such occurances, call it a statistical push as even guys as skilled as Craig can meet the wrong bear at the wrong time.) Firearm accidents with injuries (thousands per year) particularly fatal ones (a few hundred per year included in the above) are incredibly uncommon as well, even counting just the (hundreds of) millions of guns possessed and used by lawful gunowners in the US. The combination of the two approaches statistical noise. There's really no greater "point" to be made from this anecdote. Training and practice are good but by definition in complex, high-stress situations even among the most highly trained people in the world (I was once a 20 year-old Marine and led them myself) unintended consequences occur. However, law-abiding people with little formal training use guns defensively in stressful situations involving human attackers, also notoriously unpredictable and tough beyond reason, with perfect success millions of times a year. Lack of training does not equate to incompetence or ineffectiveness. Last I checked the data, in the instances of bear defense with a firearm, where the firearm didn't seem to help, there are few where it can be shown to have definitively made the situation worse. Absent that, the less than million-to-one chance you -might- shoot someone and injure or kill them, while trying to save them from a what is already a potentially deadly and definitely life-changing injurious event, doesn't rationally equate to "don't carry a gun"; particularly given the far greater number of cases where a partner with a gun actually ended the attack successfully. That said, get good realistic training and keep practicing the perishable skills. Craig....ah Craig...don't trust 20 year old kids in stressful situations with guns? Craig, now I know you have never served your country...but how old are many military personnel who fight our battles? Ok, I know it sinks in slowly...but try to understand. Anyway, what we have here is a goofball who is a bad shot. Bad luck....very bad. Could even happen in battle.... There are a few 20-year-old Marines I'd trust. They practice a lot. They are a tiny minority of 20 year olds. As for the rest of these observations, I would remind you only of two words: "Friendly fire." That's what happened here. The shooter might or not have been a "a goofball." I don't know. Maybe you know him personally. I don't. What I know is that he appears to have been someone trying to help a friend, and now he's going to have to live with this for the rest of his life. Try to show a little humanity. What about the Navy? HUH!!! Come on guys! Who shot the Somali pirates? Navy Seals. Who shot Osama? Navy Seals. I...I....I'm just really hurt here fellas.... Marine this, Marine that.....Oh yeah, they're a branch of the NAVY!!! And I didn't say department because some Marine was destined to say as my best friend does, "Yeah the Marines are a department of the Navy. The men's department." There. I said it for you. LOL Thanks, I feel better now. Anyone who forgot that there is a Price & Cost to having firearms, is overdue for a refresher. But then too, there are similar - and often far steeper - costs extracted by other facets of our lives. You think it's dicey to have a buddy shoot a bear off ya? Well, how about getting in the passenger seat of his automobile? Now we're talking real carnage. Friends kills friends in cars. Not once in a lifetime, in a freak accident, but every day, typically in entirely preventable accidents. Have you heard about Chaz Bono reprising (kinda incongruously, to my mind) the twinkle-toes male for the DWTS cameras? The surge of goodwill toward gays and other alternative gender relationships that today puts Bono's activist message on one of the biggest marques in America, is squarely rooted in the great tragedy of AIDS. AIDS noticeably thinned out the ranks of entertainers, and journalists and other wordsmiths too. Millions have been killed, and not in a fierce rush of adrenaline and blinding excitement, but very slowly and horribly. AIDS comes to us not as a tromp in the woods with a gun, as we get in touch with our inner caveman, but as we love. It is the intimacy of sex that ... kills our loved ones, hideously. Yet it remains popular to promote any version of 'free love', while warning darkly about scary firearms. Hop in my rig - we'll run home and catch DWTS. Your bigoted and creepy comment aside.... ANYONE can get AIDS....it is from UNPROTECTED SEX, period....BY ANYONE.! I don't know man. Been married 25 years now. Dated for 6 years before that. I've been having unprotected sex with the same lady for decades. I feel pretty safe. For all you know, I could be an ex-logger/fisherman transsexual female that Chaz is cheating with on the side. AIDS is of course a major threat to intravenous drug users, in the total absence of any kind of sex. Are drug addicts lesser people to you? In North America (and elsewhere around the world) the burden of AIDS has fallen disproportionally on homosexual males. Some of our professions & industries are preferred destinations for gays ... and some of these institutions have in fact experienced unusual attrition, through the tragedy of AIDS. But meanwhile, back on our thread, risks exist everywhere. In Alaska, bears are a hazard in the woods. Hunters everywhere expose themselves to risks with firearms. But risks from bears, and guns, and from the unlikely combination of an attacking bear and the questionable marksmanship of our hunting partner ... pale to insignificance compared to the risks we take - and accept without remarking! - in everyday areas of our lives. Like getting in the passenger seat of our friend's car. Or pulling off of the road into a nice private parking spot, and making out with our friend. AIDS is a threat to anyone engaged in non-monogomus unprotected sex (Christians, don't get too smug there!), but the numbers tell us clearly that gays have been hurt the worst ... them and those who share needles while injecting drugs (who are real human beings, too). Be afraid of bears? Guns? Hunting partners? Phooey. Be afraid of cars, and loving. (Just kidding! Live life to the fullest! ... but try to be smart! Bye now ... I think I hear Chaz calling!) ;) |
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