I have been thinking on why Gun Owners are becoming increasingly defensive

[krispos42]

109. I think your hope for change is overblown.

As the population of the country is urbanizing, there is less hunting going on. I used to live in the rural Upper Midwest, and people in the small towns and cities out there hunt regularly as part of their daily life. Urban-based hunters, though, have to travel more and make more preparations. Hunting isn't something you do after work (or school) and before it gets dark; it's something you plan out for a weekend once or twice a season.


However, this also means that the urban-centered people are seeing guns not as tools of hunting but as tools of self-defense, that is, tactical guns. They are not shooting to put meat on the table, they're shooting to protect themselves. So the "Fudd gun" era of wood-stocked bolt-action guns with blind magazines is giving away to plastic-stocked semiautomatics with detachable magazines.

The demands of tactical use are different from hunting use. Hunting is far less dependent on repeat-shot times and magazine capacity and far more dependent on accuracy and bullet power. An AR-15 has the ability to work well in both situations, whereas the "Fudd" gun works well in only one situation.



Concealed-carry permits are going up, handgun sales are high. I think that what is happening this that lot of urban/suburban dwellers are handling guns now, but because it's "socially unacceptable" to a lot of people, they're keeping it within their population. Urban/suburban living doesn't lend to a lot of causal gun encounters, such as exists in more rural parts where you can see farmers and rangers with guns habitually as well as hunters.