Rainier rangers: A sharp eye on the slopes

My biggest problem, is with the stupid people who can carry them.

A little off subject. A couple years ago I came home from work and my neighbor was standing on the front porch kind of in a daze and started to stammer something about accidentally blowing a hole in the side of our place. What do you know? He really did, I later found the slug on my pillow.

Well you do have a good sense of humor so I'll tour with ya anytime as long as you keep smiling. Need to find that song, thanks for the tip.

Chris-
I've always followed and enjoyed your posts and felt that it would be fun to ski with you sometime...I think we'd crack each other up.  Who knows, my best friend lives and practices medicine in Cle Elum, so maybe it'll happen.   My middle name is MacTaggart, but we've been Stateside for over two centuries...nonetheless, my grampa was all Scots in temperment  

I am a lover, not a fighter. On Friday night, I'm going to prove this. Hopefully more than once.

My biggest problem, is with the stupid people who can carry them.

A little off subject. A couple years ago I came home from work and my neighbor was standing on the front porch kind of in a daze and started to stammer something about accidentally blowing a hole in the side of our place. What do you know? He really did, I later found the slug on my pillow.

Freakin' crazy!  In college at Boulder, at a friend's house party one night, his roommate (drunk) shot through the floor accidentally and we found the slug in the bed of his downstairs neighbor, who was out at the time.  Same guy took the gun out one night (cocaina) and shot pool balls off the table.  He now, believe it or not, is a commercial airline pilot!  I wonder if they have the reinforced door in the plane to keep him locked IN the cabin, away from the passengers for their safety.

I am a lover, not a fighter. On Friday night, I'm going to prove this. Hopefully more than once.

GO Cookie!!!

I have absolutely no doubt that many of the people I meet on trails, in parking lots, at campgrounds and in other such places are armed. Most of them are not obvious about this, but I know it nonetheless.

I've led a fairly adventurous life (so far), including travels through a variety of war zones on several continents. I've transited some of the more famously dangerous neighborhoods of a number of the world's scarier cities--often on foot, sometimes with a pack on my back and my thumb raised to oncoming traffic. I've also slept in the open in more than a few places where the norm is to carry weaponry of one sort or another--in this category I'd include certain big-city slums as well as parts of Alaska and the Yukon. I've never yet carried a weapon larger than a swiss army knife.

I've had guns pointed at me three times in this country (that I know about): once by a cop, who did not shoot, although he looked awfully nervous; twice by people hunting or doing target practice who did indeed shoot---repeatedly, without apparent knowledge of my presence. Once, bullets cut leaves loose from the trees directly overhead, not ten feet from my head; another time, ricocheting bullets showered me with shattered stone on a foggy trail. These experiences have not engendered in me any real trust in the common sense, training, screening and/or intelligence of a large portion of the American gun-owning public.

Meanwhile, no bears have threatened me in any way during the substantial amounts of time I've spent on their home turf (and I could say the same about lions, tigers, leopards, elephants and various other animals generally judged "dangerous."). I've encountered each of these, of course, and often at very close range, but they generally pay me little mind. They do not scare me near so much as the unknown carriers of firearms who surround me right here at home.

I don't mean to suggest that anyone posting here shares the obvious deficits of the people firing over my head in the forest on that day, or the even more obvious impulse-control problems of whoever fired randomly into the fog off a minor mountaintop in New York before that. The real point I want to make is that laws are rightly designed to protect--insofar as this might be possible--certain inalienable rights accrued to people much like me....and those rights are demonstrably more likely at risk due to the carriers of guns than to any sort of bear, brown or black, currently inhabiting the non-polar regions of North America.

You see? I'm inclined to give the bears the benefit of the doubt because I think they've earned it. Not so human beings.

Mileages differ, sometimes significantly. I look forward to seeing more calm, respectful posts from a variety of perspectives.

Mark