They've become increasingly common in recent years. I don't think there's as much of an aversion as you appear to imagine.
TheSanSabaSongbird
joined 2 years ago
Fuck! No, I fucked that one up too and accidentally picked a crazy Haight-Ashbury 1967 hippie together with a seriously damaged Vietnam vet, the two of them getting involved in weird cultish shit long before I was born.
It was a poor decision on my part. No one to blame but myself.
You have to wonder if they've ever actually met any Taiwanese people.
I even specifically said as much in my comment.
Yeah, me too. I pat myself on the back for this one nearly every day. Probably the best financial decision I ever made.
Accidentally buying a modest house in what at the time was a "distressed" neighborhood because it was all we could afford. 15 years later the neighborhood has been gentrified and is highly desirable. The property has tripled in value and the land is now worth more than the house itself.
Anyhow, it was dumb luck on my part and again, mostly had to do with the place being affordable and relatively close to my wife's parents.
In Ore-gon no less! By the way, Oregonians love it when you say it that way.
Bad risk assessment. Most Americans are deeply confused about the things that are likely to kill them vs the things they actively worry about. Maybe that's not you, but statistically it almost certainly is.
Unless you are a young man in a concentrated poverty neighborhood, your chances of encountering deadly interpersonal violence are vanishingly small. You're far more likely to be killed by heart disease due to an unhealthy lifestyle, yet the vast majority (not all) of gun-owners pay little or no attention to that aspect of their personal well-being.
The need some people feel to carry a gun isn't rooted in accurate risk assessment and instead is about a desire to feel empowered or because like my old man --a Vietnam combat vet-- they have a blown-out fight or flight response so that everything looks like a threat even when it's not. (This is why so many Vietnam vets --again, like my old man-- ended up living off in the woods by themselves; that way they could be in control of their environment at all times which is also why they always carried firearms.)
But ultimately the real problem is that many people aren't honest with themselves about why they are so wedded to carrying.
The thing is that the experiment you imagine --implementing common-sense gun-reform-- has been run hundreds of times in other countries and the result was not, as you hypothesize, that suddenly they were overrun by bad guys with guns who don't care about gun laws, but rather was that they saw precipitous declines in gun violence and gun-related deaths.
Basically, your hypothesis, which you and others take for granted as evidently true, is objectively incorrect, and has been shown to be so many times. What does a rational actor do when their hypothesis is shown to be incorrect? Do they continue to defend it? Help me make sense of your thinking, because what it looks like to me is a complete refusal to confront and accept reality.
Wilderness Area is an entirely different designation from a national park. They aren't administered by the park service but instead by the Forest Service and they don't typically come with amenities/facilities apart from trailhead parking lots, usually a trail system and sometimes designated campsites and the like. Just FYI. Not that it really matters in this context.
Yeah, I have one of these for backpacking. Works great.