RIP
I hope this thread remains in the picture here as I think we hit almost all of the bases and won’t need to stoke the fires with yet another conversation like it. We should refer all similar questions back to this thread.
Tom
For the record, Moose have killed more
humans in North America than any other animal. I do not know if any of those killed were in Kayaks, but I suspect if you stay in camp it should not be an issue unless it is during the rut. Bill
Just in case you aren’t joking…
– Last Updated: Mar-04-09 10:53 AM EST –
Polar bear (Ursus maritimus)
Brown bear (Ursus arctos middendorffi)
Grizzly bear (generally agreed sub-species of brown bear--Ursus arctos horribilus)
Black bear (Ursus americanus)
Gummi bear (Ursus germanicus yumius)
P.S. Regarding “crazies,” as a mental
health professional, I would reserve the word “crazy” for those who could legitimately be diagnosed as having a thought or mood disorder, one of the major mental illnesses. I would not apply it at all to people like Ted Bundy, or to people who just have “antisocial personality disorder.” I would not apply it to people who are drunk or hopped up on cocaine or meth.
You are rather unlikely to encounter someone with a major mental illness, or to encounter a Ted Bundy, in the wilderness. Drunks, yes, and groups of men acting badly, yes. True crazies, no. That’s in the movies.
Kiss kiss, bang bang.
Another perspective…
– Last Updated: Mar-04-09 11:55 AM EST –
I'm not a mental health professional (probably a good thing...for sure for me), but I respect those that are--it is a tough job to do well.
I see quite a few folks on an emergent basis that have mental problems and drugs prescribed for such. g2d, you might know, but others might not realize how many folks there are out there that are prescribed one or more drugs for various 'mental problems'. It is amazing. Some days, half the folks I see are suffering in part from mental problems. And some days, half of the rest of the folks are drunk or otherwise adversly affected by alcohol, drugs, etc.
In my experience, folks on drugs or alcohol are just as dangerous and probalby more so statistically in terms of the damage they do to others and themselves than those with 'major mental problems'. So be careful not to discount them. They are, in fact, very mentally and physically impaired when hopped up and are certainly worth noting in this discussion.
So, for the purpose of this discussion, though I'm not a mental health professional, the potential effect/threat of both those with diagnosed mental health problems and those on drugs or alcohol can be very similar. Call it what you want, but just because folks doing drugs or drinking too much alcohol may not be diagnosed (many are) with a mental health problem, does not mean they are not a threat. I've seen plenty of evidence over a number of years to the contrary.
As to dealing with 'drunks'--they can be all different types--'happies' or 'meanies' and everywhere in between. I've seen them all many times. Some you can talk to and some it doesn't matter what you say or how you say it. I've had to restrain a number of drunks/druggies before we could even get the cops there for their own safety and that of others around them--all the while having them yell obscenities at you and struggling unbelievably hard. I remember one small college age girl a while back hopped up on 'shrooms. It literally took several cops and firefighters to hold her down and cuff her for her own and our safety--we were amazed at her apparent sudden strength--just shaking our heads in disbelief. I remember one guy recently that was running around town free and naked as a jaybird breaking into apartments and yelling a single phrase over and over--the cops finally tracked him down and they needed my crew to help control him enough to even get cuffs on him safely. We arrived and there's 3 cops on this guy and they really needed our help. No amount of 'knowing how to deal with them' would work.
Does anyone ever use too much alcohol or drugs in the bush? Hopefully, not very often.
Edit: And just to add a bit more to this. And I'm clearly not telling anyone to go get a gun--that's not a good option for many people and not a good option at all often. In terms of 4-legged critters. I've been tracked by cougars, had wolves display potentially threatening behavior, had black bears (a pair) first run off when startled, then spread apart and start walking back towards me (I was with a group of guys) and spent time in griz country and walked unexpectedly through what was obviously the much and very recently used living room of a big grizzly hoping that if it found us in it's 'house', my father-in-law's .340 Weatherby would drop it quick, because I was unarmed. In fact, I was unarmed during each of these incidents. In many more encounters, the critters have run off quickly, never to be seen again. But that doesn't always happen. There are a tremendous number of kayaking related stories regarding dealing with 'crazies' or 4-legged critters.
Should you go get a gun? Not necessarily, obviously.
Should you be aware? All the time.
In Georgia, most of our problems with
violent people along rivers have been with drunks. A small number (like two) have been with aggressive landowners who didn’t understand the limitations on their rights to control trespassing. I can’t recall a case where someone with an active major mental illness was violent or threatening to paddlers, but in a large state, I’m sure there must have been a few. Alcohol makes people act crazy at times. Cocaine and meth do also, but patterns of use are such that one is less likely to encounter active users on the river.
yes
I have access to this forum. That’s all the purpose you need to know.
I posted what I did because you stuck your fingers in your ears more than once in this thread.
BTW - I hope I wasn’t supposed to read all that.
Apparently, there’s no point in you…
…reading it ‘all’ anyway.
Have a nice day.
Altered mental status
can be caused by:
hypoglycemia
hypoxia
seizure disorder
closed head injury
high fever
adverse prescription drug reaction
and many other medical conditions.
Die thread, die!
Been there, seen that. Your point?
Hey! Read! It’s not that hard.
– Last Updated: Mar-05-09 12:59 AM EST –
What follows is kind of long. It is also a bit repetitive because of the repetive nature of the way you establish conflict. I just looked for the post which describes what you are doing perfectly, where someone recommended that if you feel safer carrying a gun, just say so rather than going to tremendous lengths to create convoluted reasoning which masks what's really going on. That would work for me, as I say for the umpteenth time that I do NOT have any problem with someone who just feels safer with a gun and who doesn't mind a pound or two of steel hanging off their belt all the time.
Anyway, this last post was funny, because in responding to Seakak, the only thing you did was go back to criticize stuff which I and g2d said several days ago. For my part, nearly all the points you brought up this time around were things I already tried to clarify for you at least one other time way back when this discussion was still current, or which were already more fully clarified in responses to other people's posts as well. That, along with your way of choosing specific words and applying meanings which are convenient for making yourself look good and someone else look bad is why I said then, and continue to say now, that you can't read. Of course, I know you "can" read but are choosing not to. I'll still use the word "can't" at this time because something about your motivation in this instanse isn't allowing you to take advantage of that skill (which is ALSO a perfect case for finding and reading the post I mentioned above).
What you do is something I think they call the "straw man" style of debate, where one person chooses particular statement from what another person has said and assigns a meaning to those words which is totally alien to that of the original message. Doing this makes it easy to claim that the other person is wrong, screwed-up, or having whatever character flaw you choose. After all, how can you possibly look bad in commparison to the other person if you assign meanings to their words which no one in their right mind could value? Well, there IS a way you can look bad, and that is if anybody else was paying attention to the conversation in the first place and therefore recognizes what you are doing.
Here are some examples, mostly of straw-man reasoning, but also of plain nonsense. Your words are in quotes.
"To answer your question. It became obvious to me that my discussions both the g2d and gbg weren't going to go anywhere else. Time to put energy elsewhere." You say it's time to put your energy elsewhere? Oh really? Is THAT the reason your answer to Seakak is actually a dissertation devoted entirely to arguing against the statements you claim to be ignoring? Is THAT the reason you can't even relax this obsession to a degree which would allow you to percieve the very simple meaning of what he said to you about unloading all that crap on him?
"gbg even went as far as to say that people who might choose to carry a gun have an 'emotional problem'." Nope, that's entirely misconstrued and I've already told you that, and I have made responses to others in this thread which also make that clear. Time to give this particular straw-man argument a rest.
"...by carrying a gun for defense, and therefore I see this as an emotional problem, a skewing of reality on the part of the person who "needs" a gun." That's a partial quote, and the ommitted words were quite important in conveying the REAL meaning of what I said. Whether that statement was well-worded the first time or not, it doesn't matter because AGAIN this is something I tried to clarify for you yet you continue to refer only to the original statment which you misunderstood, apparently by design.
"Maybe if he wasn't 'single and free as a bird', he'd have something to protect and might have a different perspective on this issue." Not only is this wrong on ALL counts, it doesn't even address the topic at hand. It looks like your claim here is that I feel like I have nothing worth protecting on account of being single, and therefore I place less value on protection "in general" than you do. This implication is the straw man again. What I REALLY said was that I've spent a LOT of time outdoors simply BECAUSE I'm single and have more free time than most people do, and in all that time, I've never had a threatening encounter of any kind with another person in the outdoors. I said that I am comfortable going into the outdoors without a gun because my own experience suggests that being unarmed is assuming a reasonably low risk. Is it risk-free? Of course not, and I have not said that is. I ALSO said in various posts now that I think it's okay if someone else wants to be prepared for something for which I don't feel the need, and further, that I would consider carrying a gun in a situation where it weren't too inconveinient "for me" (meaning, it's MY choice and that's as far as it goes). Early on, you asked me if I had read "every post" as if doing so held the key to seeing things your way. Here's a case where you've had the opportunity to read a particular statement of mine and interpret it in its actual context but you chose not to, and in addition, you've had the opportunity to read OTHER posts of mine which would ALSO show your interpretation of this statement to be out-of-wack, but referring to them as such wouldn't aid your twisted purpose.
"I've had several run-ins in the 'bush' over 30 years+ of being in the 'bush'. When I wasn't married and/or didn't have kids and was usually with several friends, I didn't give as much heed to those situations as I might now. I hope gbg might allow for a different perspective, but the wording of his argument didn't allow for that." Wrong again, on both counts, and again it's because you are only seeing meanings that allow you to appear virtuous by comparison, rather than seeing the correct meanings. While I have to wonder just how threatening those "run-ins" actually were if in fact you didn't need to give them much heed in the days before you were married (most people value their own life in and of itself far too much to say such a thing, so I figure the "threat" must not have been all that you claim), I never said anything to imply I don't place much value on my own life, and never said anything that would make it appear impossible for me to accept the value another person has for their family, or how their own personal sense of being needed would increase once a family is in the picture. Again, you couldn't write such garbage if you read what was actually there instead of just appying a convenient (and in this case, morally repugnant), meaning to a few key words of your own choosing.
"I never said it was 'important' to carry a gun in the woods or that there was a general 'need' to or that I even felt the 'need' to." That is very true, but this was strongly implied by your total non-acceptance of the notion that another person might not percieve the same degree of risk or "need" to carry a gun as you, and the sheer intensity of your reaction, a reaction that was so extreme that it blinded you to what was actually being said, which spoke volumes (do you even realize that Seakak addressed that issue too when he responded to you?). Again, I sure wish I had found that gem of a post which is somewhere below. It fits SO perfectly. In the absence of that particular post, read some of the stuff about "choices" written by both Angstrom and Focus (two guys, among a few others, with whom I agree 100 percent regarding the reasoning behind making one's own personal choice).
gbg,
– Last Updated: Mar-05-09 1:38 AM EST –
I know I said I wouldn't post to you again...I apologize for doing so.
I think we need to agree to disagree. I think your reading comprehension and rhetoric is awful and you think mine is awful.
Some of the same things you bash me on, are clearly stated in other posts of mine here and are in agreement with you. Others, like the 'emotional problem' bit you wrote...no matter how many times I read that post, it tells me you believe that I, or someone like me, hasn't fully and properly evalutated all of life's 'risks', which is an incredible statement to make seeing as you don't know me, and if I choose to carry a gun, have some kind of 'emotional problem'. Have you noticed that you never truly explained that statement yet? You've just said that I took it wrong--that's not explaining it. Apparently, it needs explaining to this simple man you've run across that needs your expertise. Please do so.
If I've picked out a few of your statements to take issue with, you've certainly done the same and treated them similarly. The straw man liveth. I'm not perfect--far from it. And, you're not perfect either, right?
I bet if we were in the same room and could talk this through, we would find a lot more common ground. However, this method of communication does not allow that but does allow for quite a bit of miscommunication, which I'm sure has occured here.
Probably better just to let it lie and not embarass ourselves anymore...I certainly don't think that this particular part of the thread has been very much help to anyone.
Good night.
Are you Mary Queen of Scots?..I am…
– Last Updated: Mar-05-09 11:03 AM EST –
***%^&(^&*&*$&$*&&%*%$%%^&**%* I think she's dead......No I'm not.... #$%^%&^#^&^)()&@#@#%&$%&^$%%&..........She's dead now.............No I'm not!
maybe we should arm the “crazies”
They are already armed.
I’m not perfect either, that’s correct.
You are also correct that this whole thing probably didn’t help anyone. One thing I did yesterday was decide to write after a 12-hour work day which was preceded by 3 hours of sleep, and as many times as I’ve been “taught” that lesson (both when writing assigments in college and graduate school, as well as when writing trivial stuff on a message board), sometimes I just don’t realize how much better I would do in such a situation if I waited until the next day to write.
You DID ask for clarification regarding the thing I said about “emotional problems” (or whatever the actual words were), so here goes. I think it’s best illustrated by the attitudes commonly expressed regarding two potentially life-saving devices: seatbelts and handguns. Even though seatbelts are many thousands of times more likely to save your life than a gun, no one gets their blood pressure up when advocating their use. Both devices can be very effective if the time comes when they are needed, and making either device ready for action is looked at in about the low-key way by people who are truely level-headed and healthy in their ways of thinking, with the only difference being that any idiot can effectively use a seatbelt, but it takes a lot of mental and physical training to be ready to use a gun while under duress.
Many gun enthusiasts are very level-headed about the choice they have made about keeping a gun handy for defense. These are the people who simply DON’T “talk the talk”, and therefore they really don’t draw much attention to themeselves in gun-related conversations. On the other hand, it disturbs me very much when the kind of person I have regretebly decided to believe is the “average” type of handgun hobbiest, starts talking about the subject of self-defense with firearms, because they are much too enthusiastic. It’s simply not a subject where this kind of enthusiasm is healthy or warrented. The book Angstrom mentioned about this topic is called “The Gravest Extreme” for good reason, yet the kind of person I am referring to who is genuinely enthusiastic in conversations about the topic would probably name such a book “When Opportunity Knocks”.
Do you know the type of person I am talking about? Have you ever, or do you know anyone, who has made statments like these?
“If anyone ever breaks into MY house, I’ll show him he picked the wrong person to mess with.”
“If that (whatever crime was recently committed in town) had happened while I was around, let me tell you, things would have turned out a little differently for that punk”, or the standard variation, “If the victim of (whatever crime was recently committed in town) had been carrying a gun, things would have turned out a little differently.”
What I’m trying to say is that most of the people I’ve met who are convinced that even an average person has a very clear and compelling reason to be prepared with deadly force is prone to saying things like that, Which I believe are clear examples of distorted thinking (also known as an “emotional problem”). I find statements like that to be extremely scary, and scarily common among the handgun-enthusiast crowd. Deciding whether or not to shoot somebody in self-defense or defense of another is far too serious a scenario to talk about with that kind of attitude. I also have noticed that using various “slightly scary” experiences as justification for “expecting the worst” is another common mindset of people who I percieve to be just a bit “too enthusiastic” about the topic of defense by deadly force.
Maybe I was wrong, and I hope I was, but there was something about your mannerism in responding to the notion that lots of people don’t find it difficult to accept the risk associated with not arming themselves (or investing 100s or 1000s of hours in the kind of training necessary to use a gun effectively in a combat situation), that sounded too familiar. For any person who DOES want to arm and train themselves, great, as long as they don’t over-state the odds, or appear genuinely enthusiastic about being ready.
This really IS related to what I said about weighing probability of individual risks, rather than being irrelevant. Any person who understands why we don’t wear crash helmets when driving our cars to work or the grocery store (even though doing so would save far more of us from an untimely death than if we armed ourselves) should understand why some of us don’t percieve a compelling the need for self-defense with a gun. To see that comparison as “irrelevant” is not an example of healthy thinking.
I hope that is clearer now.
Those statements make bells go off…
…in my head as well. I DO TRY to keep an open mind about folks that make statements like that. Does it make me uneasy when I hear statements like that? You bet. In my mind, a seed is planted and I start to wonder if that is someone who may not be careful and discreet. But I don’t believe I said anything close to the statements you shared. I tend to recoil a bit when statements like that are made.
In fact, my very first post in this entire thread states at one point: “Carry concealed very discreetly and carefully–it is not something to trifle with.” My point being that no one else should ever know you are carrying. Be discreet and don’t go around with a pistol stuck in your pocket–that’s just not going to do anybody any good generally. Be knowledgable AND careful AND safe AND discreet.
So, I’m still not sure what I said that set you off initially. Initially it was about the potential ‘crazies’ in the ‘bush’, I guess. g2d said he’d never seen them and I was saying whether or not he’s seen them, they are there. Just don’t be blind to that potential fact was my point. Perhaps it was lost in interpretation.
Did the fact that I’ve done some research and can talk about various rounds in terms like ‘feet per second’, ‘ft. lbs. of energy at the muzzle’, bullet construction, etc. set off bells in your head? If it did, that is only my desire to actually know for myself what a certain combination of components is capable of doing and what it should be selected for. The right tool for the job at hand. Long before I bought a pistol, I spent time learning the science and art of long-range shooting in the field. Knowing exactly things like ballistic coefficients of bullets, bullet design (and testing this in the field), the exact measured muzzle velocity of your bullet, barometric pressure, temperature, wind direction and speed, humidity, elevation, and whether you will use a scope that has turrets that adjust in minutes of angle (MOA) or Milradians and knowing how to compute these and inputting this information into a ballistic calculator on a Windows based PDA combined with a great deal of field shooting in preperation for hunting is something I’ve been doing for some time.
Some of this nature has been transmitted to pistol selection. IF this information did bother someone, and I’m not saying it did, that’s very unfortunate, because believe me, from what I’ve seen, it would be helpful if many more gun owners/hunters cared enough and learned this stuff and became more knowledgeable and hopefully more aware and safer and were able to take game more humanely or make better decision in general regarding firearms because of it.
Many folks do not do much research about many things, but I’m typically not that way and like to be as aware as reasonbly possible. I have no regrets about the research I’ve done and the fact that I can talk about it and reccomend this or that. The OP asked a question and I was attempting to help out.
Well, I didn’t expect some kind of
SPANISH INQUISITION!
GBG
My take on your thoughts.
“What I’m trying to say is that most of the people I’ve met who are convinced that even an average person has a very clear and compelling reason to be prepared with deadly force is prone to saying things like that, Which I believe are clear examples of distorted thinking (also known as an “emotional problem”). I find statements like that to be extremely scary, and scarily common among the handgun-enthusiast crowd. Deciding whether or not to shoot somebody in self-defense or defense of another is far too serious a scenario to talk about with that kind of attitude.”
I believe the comments your above quotation draws from are mostly the result of the confidence that a handgun brings to many of it’s owners, not necessarily a “mental flaw”. It matters not that they even know much more than how to pull a trigger, or how they sound when they say stuff like that. Many would have trouble even loading a firearm under stress because they do not even practice more than a few rounds a year but they nonetheless feel confident enough to make the John Wayne comments.
The people I find really scary are the ones who come to my gun counter and display terrible gun handling knowledge. They don’t check the guns to see if they are empty, point them down the aisle where customers inadvertently step into their “line of fire”, point them right at my face as they fumble with the controls, etc. The good part, I can legally refuse to sell a gun to anyone I feel shouldn’t have one.
Tom