The side effects of such widespread gun usage in the US are a bummer, but at least that proliferation of guns protected your country from being overrun by a tyrannical facist government.
It's amazing how well their gun culture stopped the tyrannical dictatorship from taking over!!!!
The gun culture is the fascists. So yeah it was a success.
Step one was convincing these paranoid morns that the "real fascists" were people asking other politely to stop using slurs.
Best they could do for 4 years after an armed, violent attempted coup..... was nothing.
Hard to believe nothing didn't work. Back to the drawing board, maybe we can try caving to the demands of the rich and connected, the middle of the road voters surely want to get screwed without consent by the rich, but with gay marriage and more concern expressed about people getting hurt. Where is liz cheney, we can use her as the running mate, this is going to work great.
I think many people forget that these deluded middle of the road hogs think that they are just one lucky break or miracle away from being the rich and connected themselves. This is why they insatiably lick their spittle. Prosperity gospel tells them so.
Good point, thank god, wait a minute...
Pretty sure eagles are in the out group, so they deserve to die. /s
Maybe if Dear Orange Leader tells them to give a shit about eagles, they might...
This is not exclusively an American problem. Eagles in the Italian alps are dying mostly of lead poisoning, too.
"Choose lead free ammunition"
No?
Just stop shooting guns and murdering things like a crazy ape?
Let's try the not poisonous bulltes first. Because something tells me that Americans can't even do that.
The American mind cannot comprehend this. Probably due to neurological symptoms from lead poisoning or sth
What are you even talking about? There are plenty of people that hunt even here in Germany.
Americans don't have a monopoly on hunting.
I'm talking about a whole country being obsessed with owning and firing guns. I don't observe that in Germany. Also a hunters license comes with mandatory education about responsibility and preserving wildlife.
So do hunting licenses in the US. Wildlife enforcement has some of the most authority in the state.
The issue is the states allow inherently unsafe munitions to be used. If they changed hunters in the US would comply
OK, I think this is an incredibly stupid argument.
From the ethical perspective of anti-meat, hunting animals is so much better. They get to live natural lives, and they die in a similar manner to they do in nature (maybe a little faster, which is good).
From an environmental perspective, hunting keeps pray populations in naturally healthy levels, since most of their predators are driven out of populated areas, because people don't like to be attacked by wild animals. It also doesn't consume many resources, as they're just living their lives in nature.
I don't think there's any valid argument against hunting honestly, besides just being grossed out by it. That's fine, and you can just not do it. I've never hunted in my life, and I suspect I never will. It's not really something I want to do. I can't construct a good argument against it though, and I suspect you can't either. If you can, give it a shot, and remember animals dying and being eaten is natural, and frequently necessary to maintain an equilibrium that was evolved to be maintained by external factors. Deer, for example, will die horrible deaths of starvation, and do damage to the environment, if they aren't hunted by humans.
Just because something happens on its own in nature doesn’t mean it’s a good thing per se - for instance, I prefer the warmth of my heated house over the "natural" cold temperatures of the winter months. That’s the famous "appeal to nature" fallacy right there.
Also, like others already pointed out, hunting deer is only necessary because we eradicated most of their natural predators. Making the case for hunting today in order to fix a problem hunting created in the past feels oddly circular to me.
Crazy ape comment aside (i'd put it closer to apes with delusions of grandeur but that's just me), not shooting guns and allowing hunting aren't mutually exclusive.
Especially given all the hunting that happened pre-gun.
I don't know if it's on purpose but your answer seems to be ignoring a lot of the realities of how the things you are proposing would work (or not work, as the case may be).
The overwhelming majority of bullets are used against paper or steel targets. Most hunters take the entire carcass for butchering, so the eagles aren't eating lead from animals shot and left in the wilderness. And given the volume needed, I wouldn't be surprised that they're eating fragments fired at steel targets that they mistake for rocks to keep in their stomach to grind up food.
Don't know what they do over there, but we usually get the lungs and guts out as soon as possible in order to keep the meat from spoiling. Long lived predators that likes to scavenge can develop lead poisoning from those remains if it's their main source of food.
If confusing with rocks was the main source you'd expect it to be just as common in other birds.
People don’t really change their actions very often. I mean, people are still posting on twitter, for example.
We killed the predators on a lot of our continent. Deer hunting is ecologically necessary here. And thats before we get into the boar problem
Why is lead used at all? Why not steel?
Lead is denser, it weighs more per volume, so it travels farther and faster when propelled by an explosion. Uranium works even better, which is why they use depleted uranium in some military applications, as it's more dense than lead, quite a bit better. Gold or platinum would work better too as they are heavier.
Fun fact, in a half billion years or so, the element of uranium decays into lead.
While that's a factor, it's a very minor one - soft metals (lead and copper) are used as projectiles primarily because the bullet itself deforms to engage with the rifling when fired (softer materials also present far less wear on the rifling as a result - this is why shotguns, which are smoothbore and thus far less delicate, often use steel projectiles). For rifles, the weight of the projectile is very secondary to the mechanical properties of the material while it's being fired, and in fact there are many brands of ammunition available that use steel cores jacketed with a softer metal (though almost entirely for their penetrating ability - the deformation of a solid round you get with softer materials is actually far more desirable when hunting since you're less likely to go through the animal you've shot.)
Ban lead bullets then. Allows people to keep hunting while preventing more pollution in the wild.
Plenty of time after that to ban other things.
People have tried to ban it. But it's an ever so slight inconvenience for hunters to switch to other ammunition.
We did that in California. It worked.
That's a very un-American solution. I think it would be much better to sell fire arms to eagles so they become aware of the problem and they can effectively hunt fresh prey and thereby circumvent the entire issue.
This is the same reason why the California condor nearly went extinct. Afaik the education campaign worked and hunters generally made the swap to steel jacket (I assume) bullets
I read this twice. I'm trying to comprehend. The problem, I think I comprehend absolutely perfectly but my soul doesn't want to. Am this close to screaming until hoarse and sweaty. Am at work so will see if I need to do this in the parking lot.
I dream sometimes of all the regressives in the world getting into a rocket ship and blasting off for some fantasy Planet B, leaving the progressives behind to clean up the mess.
And we do, and it's terrible, but slowly the world heals.
Then the regressives realize that Planet B is too far away, and that Earth is actually faring pretty well now, and they try to come back.
When we don't let them set foot on Earth, they promise to nuke us from space, and then there's this standoff with them in orbit pointing a weapon at the only place that can support their progeny.
It's the leading cause of death for many birds of prey in Europe too. Partly because hunters leave killed animals or their guts lying around, where the birds find them. It's not just vultures who eat already dead prey, many species do if it's available, like eagles. But even birds who only eat freshly killed prey (like falcons) are dying at alarming rates. Why? Because their prey often has lead embedded in their bodies. It's not just that they eat lead because they mistake the pellets for food. One in three living ducks and geese in Europe has been shot before and has lead permanently embedded inside their body. Hunters will shoot at a swarm, kill one animal and hurt many more.
Ehh...rarher choose no bullets at all? 🙄
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