That business today went quicker than expected.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Red October1984
I would expect a European to think like that. No offense, but hunting is also an American tradition (it's how we control our animal population) and I think there will always be good hunters here in the MidWest. You guys in Europe have had enough war and plague in Europe. I couldn't expect that all of you are armed and shoot animals in your free time.
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We're do a 'lil overgeneralizing here, don't we? Us "Europeans"? Let me tell you that the Swedes and Fins, also the Norwegians, are known to do a lot of hunting, too. Also the people in parts of Poland, Germany, and the Alpine forest regions anyway. It'S just that it is not a majority doing so.
And I bet money on that a majority of Americans do not leave the metropoles every weekend by the dozens of millions to go hunting either.
On the other hand, remember the big conflict there was in Britian some years ago about fox hunts being banned yes or no.
I do not care for hunting being labelled as a "tradition". And declaring a whole nation's spirit on basis of the practicing of a minorty, has its intrinsic definition problem anyway. The dolphin massacres they commit once a year in that Japanese village also is a "tradition". To hell with that latter tradition, I prefer the villagers slitting their own throats instead of massacring the sea. Killing for trophies and for fun, is despicable. Always. You could as well defend the torturing of cats and horses for fun. Or those stalkers sometimes haunting the farms over here by night and killing horses with speers or knifes or small callibre rifles. Just for fun, or their own pathologic personality's satisfaction.
The argument of controlling animal population, is a two-sided sword. Sometimes it hits the truth. Sometimes its being abused for defending hunter's interests to go out there and shoot at something. Sometimes population control is only needed because man before has messed up the balance in the ecosystem all by himself, and then wants to repair it. It can be complicated matter to argue about. It is not that simple and self-explanatory as you just made it appear by giving it one single sentence.
And the experience of my father, he is sports pistol shooter, doing the sports precision thing, don'T knbow how to call that in English. Spoirts shotters have very bad opinion of the many sunday hunters we have in Germany. Idiots that run into the forst during a hunt and shoot many empty holes into the sky and have not a clue of what it means to shoot with real precisiuon. The club my father is in - has banned hunters from membership. Too little discipline, too big mouths, to incompetent skill. Some policeman train there occasionally, too. German police hates our hunters as well. Too incompetent, too much Wild Bill Hickock wanting to shoot from the hip, literally. Hunters over here have an extremely bad reputation. Occasionally some soldiers come to his club too, to practice real pistol precision shooting - in the army, these guys say, they are not practicing that with that consequence at all. There is a distinctive difference between a trained sniper and a regular soldier. A soldier fires a LMG or MMG, a hundred rounds and does not hit anything. A sniper fires five rounds and hits five times.
As a side note anecdote: I once read how they counted Vietnamese losses in the war: the American unit leader calculated how many guns fired for how long into how wide a green wall of trees, then there was a total number of rounds spend from all that M16 and MMG fire, and that translated into so and so many "kills". This number then was reported to Washington. Bodies were not cpounted most of thew time - nor found. 
If reality does not please you, invent your own - preciseöly calculated. 
In Bavaria, there is one village, where they practice a shooting event that I think is unique in the world. I saw a movie about that some time ago, but I forgot title and names. They shoot at targets over the lake. And they aim not at the targets but the reflections on the water. The bullets get bounced off the water' surface -
and then hit the targets. I think it was called "Spiegelschießen", combined with that village's name.