I thought some of the language being used to describe this looked a little weaselly, and thought something else might be happening, so I did some cross-checking against population.
In fact, comparing white percentage of county population with number of office closures in that county:
75%+ white: 12 of 33 counties had a closure (45%)
75-50%: 10 of 22 (45%)
50-25%: 5 of 9 (56%)
Would preclearance have stopped this, or is it just the general defining deviancy down?
Not sure what happened to that last row. Of the
From the wording of the first article, it's not clear to me you couldn't still get a photo ID at these satellite offices, just not an actual driver's licence. But the second article takes it as read that you can't. And given Alabama's track record, I'd be amazed if it wasn't part of the motivation.
Oops, duh. HTML.
Of the <25% white counties, 3 of 3 saw an office closed.
How do the statistics look vs. total population per county? Would it be defensible in isolation as closing lesser-used rural services, or something?
That was the first thing I looked at. There's facial plausibility in that most of the closures are in small counties - 29 in counties with less than 50K population, only 2 in counties with greater (Baldwin and St. Clair). But Alabama has black rural counties, and those are exactly the ones you would target if you wanted to disenfranchise, and that's exactly what they seem to be doing. (Harder to get rid of ones in big cities, I imagine).
Looked at another way: of the 19 counties with less than 50K population and less than 60% white population, 12 saw closures (63%). Of the remaining 48, 18 saw closures (38%).
The news article is fairly clear in stating that the offices aren't closing, they are just not going to have drivers license examiners there ever.
7: That seems much less defensible--stupidly so. If you're not closing the office altogether to save money, how do you justify ending provision of just driver's licenses? It seems like the savings, at that point, would be trivial against the remaining cost of employees and rent.
Why would Alabama even need to do this? It has a forever-firmly entrenched white Republican majority for anything national or state-wide. I guess maybe to marginally make a few Republican seats safer, or reduce even further whatever patronage needs to be given to black rural areas, or just sheer Alabama-ishness. I'd be more worried about it in Georgia, NC or Florida.
9: Alabama had an extremely powerful white government when it imposed Jim Crow laws, I imagine.
10 -- yes, but it was majority black until about 1940.
True. In the end I'd bet it's simply that they're in it for the long haul, and are willing to expend energy on things that might extend their dominion from, say, 20 years to 30.
11: Really? I thought Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina were the majority black states, and that Alabama has always been whiter than the rest of the deep south because it has a large upland region. Having trouble finding numbers though.
Yeah I guess this looks suspicious but it's probably entirely innocent. I mean, it's not as if racism is still enough of a thing that we need some kind of voting rights act or anything.
9/12: My guess is that it's a matter of principle ("Black people shouldn't get to vote!") as much as political expediency. There doesn't need to be some further benefit for people who already view 'stopping those people from voting' as a benefit in itself.
In the Court case, Alabama will argue that this is not a voting rights violation because it would have closed all of the drivers' license offices in the Black counties even if it had absolutely no effect on voter registration. It will prove, for example, that it also stopped paving roads and providing water and electricity to the same counties.
13 -- no, you're right. But Alabama was about 40-50% black until the end of the great migration, so with a fairly-represented black population and a small minority of (liberal, or poor) whites, blacks+white racial liberals could have dominated Alabama politics until fairly recently. Important to remember that Jim Crow was as much about keeping a majority or near-majority from power as it was about repressing a "minority."
And looking it up even that's a little misleading, 1920-30 is when enough blacks left Alabama so that a solid black block+tiny white minority could no longer exercise political power, assuming votes were counted fairly. After that, the black population is a little more than a third, roughly where it is today. Still, I think the broader point stands, Jim Crow wasn't just about "racism" it was about a subset of white people trying to hold onto power in an anti-democratic way.
I'm pretty sure exactly nobody would argue with you about that.
Yeah, your point is very valid, it's just that Alabama is a relatively bad example. You'd be 100% right about Mississippi. It all just comes down to geography: Alabama has too many hills.
I guess not, put that way, but people sometimes (maybe particularly in the law) think of Jim Crow as the result of unrestrained domination by a white, populist majority over a minority group, when in fact it was at least as much an attempt to keep a majority or near-majority of the population in many Southern States from actual, dominant power.
I'll only oppress up to 50 of the local population. Because scruples.
Black people have wheels instead of feet?
I think most people are at least vaguely award that it was often a majority being repressed. If only from the "since Reconstruction" came into so many "first African American elected to X" stories.
came s/b clause. Or something that makes sense.
25: I don't think I naturally connected those two facts. White people can vote for black people, after all.
It seems unlikely that white people who created laws to make it nearly impossible for black people to vote would do so in order that they might elect black people.
Does Alabama have internet license and registration renewal?
That's what has made it possible for MA to close a lot of registry offices and still function. You only have to show up to get a new license or new registration. (Or if you are over 70 or to update your photo and eye test every ten years, but I digress.)
Still, something that is harder if you aren't on the internet discriminates against poor people, and my guess is black Alabamans are poorer than white ones.
Not that I think they were aiming at the poor rather than the black. Or maybe it's a two-fer!
"Carpetbaggers" and other non-segregationist white people were often mentioned in grade school history - possibly they got as much word count as contemporary Black politicians and movements.
Starting from a google search, I tried to see how easy it was to locate info about AL ID requirements, and see how easy it would be to get the paperwork together. Try it.
We appreciate your commitment to avoiding spoilers.
Spoilers. Doesn't look that crazy. I mean, difficult for poor people who don't have access to, e.g., a birth certificate, but nothing all that peculiar.
Well, first I googled "alabama dmv" and followed the first link, which is the Alabama motor vehicle division. Didn't see anything obvious until I looked at "related links" and found "driver license." Clicked that, got a 404 error and a link to the Alabama law enforcement agency page. Clicked that and had to search the sub-menus to find a link to the driver license page, and there's a link there to the page LB linked. I figure a lot of people have given up before this point.
The requirements themselves are pretty standard. It's still a pain to get an ID, but I don't think that's at issue.
Ah. I googled "alabama driver license identification requirement", which got me right there.
great migration
I don't know if there's ever been a serious attempt to rename it the "great migration of refugees fleeing racial terror," but I'd be on board.
Compelling piece from the NYT a few weeks ago: "Horror Drove Her From South. 100 Years Later, She Returned." The last 2 paragraphs pasted below are heartbreaking.
When she was 7, her family fled Ellisville amid talk of lynchings. On to Illinois, where white mobs rioted. To Ohio, where the Klan raised torches. To western New York, where she and her steelworker husband had nine children, and the one miscarriage she always includes in her account.
Now, after many decades of saying she didn't even want to see Mississippi on a map, Ms. Kirkland was here for the first time since 1915. Here in Ellisville.
. . . Ms. Kirkland told her life story. It is a story in the oral-history tradition, with census records, a note tucked into a Bible and the confirming nods of family members -- who have heard the same accounts since the age of comprehension -- providing notarization of memory.
But its undercurrent of pain caused her repeatedly to turn to her son and ask, "Do I have to tell that?"
Yes, he answered gently. People should know.
I was trying to act like a normal person.
Based on articles I've read about how the normals search the internet, a true search would be something like "how do i get a drivers license", and you hope that Google solves the rest.
I googled "how do i get a drivers license in alabama" and it took me to one of those Google infobox pages with a link to what seems to be the right place on the Alabama DMV site.
Ogged's VCR is still flashing 12:00.
I thought leaving in the misspelling would make it more authentic.
For Halford: Death Metal attracts sharks.
|| mass shootings running at just under one per day so far this year. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/01/2015-274-days-294-mass-shootings-hundreds-dead/
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49: You're not giving us enough credit. 294 mass shootings in 274 days is just over one per day.
Most of those are fallout from the Drug War though, not lone wolf internet trolls.
Or people flipping out and killing their family too, I guess.
53-54: "There are only about thirty murders a year in London, and not all of them are serious; some of them are just husbands killing their wives".
Eh, it's just a different social problem. Good point about the pervasive misogyny in all this though.
???
Most shooting victims in the US are male. As in, 91%.
Anyway, surely a mass shooting is a mass shooting, and the social problem underlying it is "guns too easily available"? I can't see how an honest look at the situation would come to a different conclusion.
But more men kills their female partners than vice versa.
58: It's like with the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom. Sure, it looks like anything with more than Uranium is unstable, but that's just because you haven't added enough of them.
The theory is sound. At a sufficient concentration of guns, mass shootings will be impossible because all the other guns will deflect the bullets.
Better mental health services would help, as would closing various loopholes in the background check system. Improved social services generally would help with the gang related shootings, as would programs like midnight basketball.
The difficult thing is the second amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court. I don't think any really serious gun control is ever going to happen until the second amendment is repealed, which will occur about the twentieth of never.
In the end of the day a certain number of people dead every year is the price we pay for ready access to guns. That's a price enough of the US population is willing to pay that there's really no chance of effective legislation to address the problem except around the margins. Even Sandy Hook wasn't enough to get anything done.
59: no doubt. OTOH the year of life with the highest risk of becoming the victim of homicide is the first year (in particular the first week), and that's overwhelmingly female perpetrators (89%), usually the victim's mother.
(When I say "highest" that means "overwhelmingly highest". First week of life has an order of magnitude higher risk of death by homicide not only than any other week, but than any other five-year period, according to the CDC).
Same reason in both cases: perpetrator is bigger and stronger than the victim.
63.last: If the baby was armed that wouldn't be an issue.
Most shooting victims in the US may be male (and some of that is also self-inflicted, which is tragic in a different way), but the coverage of mass shootings often seems to downplay anti-woman domestic violence. This article is pretty useful..
62.2: what are the odds of it being reinterpreted?
65: the answer to a bad baby with a gun is a good baby with a gun!
58: It's like with the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom. Sure, it looks like anything with more than Uranium is unstable, but that's just because you haven't added enough of them.
Like how 164 mph is actually the safest speed to go, but a little less is just stupid.
66 is interesting - like it says, those are the ones you just don't hear about. We assume "mass shooting" to mean "lone wolf internet troll", like Natilo says - and that it involves a large number of victims, somewhere public. And in fact most multiple shootings are anything but. (Overall mass shooting victims are pretty much 50-50 male/female, as you'd expect.)
Aaand a thoroughly depressing article from a journalist who explains that she keeps a prewritten template for mass shooting stories because it's needed so often.
I have no idea what is going to happen on teh guns. Right now, America seems dead set on heightening the contradictions (e.g. open carry demonstrations vs. police shooting black people with toy guns; more areas getting medal detectors and other security while laws are being passed to make it legal to carry in bars/churches, etc.)
71: actually, hang on, not as you would expect. Hmm.
67: It's conceivable that some new court will reinterpret it, but I hold out no hope. The wording of the amendment is horrible, so there's a possibility that some future liberal dominated court will find that it's not an individual right and that you need to be part of a state run militia to have a gun, but I don't see that happening any time soon. As you can tell, I've pretty much given up hope on the subject.
Right now, the courts aren't the whole issue. What some state governments are doing is more than what the court says you have to do.
Aren't there are higher proportion of women among the victims of rampage killings?
Changing the guidelines for how media reports on rampage killings, the details of the crimes and the perpetrator's may go a long way to diminishing the number of such crimes in the future*. As with similar reporting guidelines with suicides which help prevent copycats.
*Because post-Newton we know any kind of gun control will not happen in the US for very many years.
I know I've said this before, but one of the most infuriating things I have heard on this topic was a great talk by a researcher who was studying "injury prevention" at a large university hospital.
Guess what. The overwhelming majority of injuries were gunshot wounds. Shocker, I know.
Guess what else. She couldn't put those words anywhere in her grant application or public discussion because it would jeopardize her ability to keep doing research.
IIRC there is an actual ban on federal funding looking at gunshot wounds as a public health issue?
78: The CDC is forbidden by law from studying gun injuries and deaths, thanks to the Republicans and the NRA. It's just completely crazy.
79, 80. Did Obama mention that in his speech? Because if not then he should have. At least he can mention it the next time he gives it.
Another thing I wonder about is what's going to happen with the NRA when market saturation for gun sales hits. That is, a while back the NRA was captured by gun makers (as opposed to gun shooters). That's when they really went off the rails and I don't know how the NRA would function as a political player without that money.
But the gun market is getting to be like the market for really dangerous Beanie Babies. That is, most sales are to collectors. Eventually, I'm assuming that's going to reach saturation and crash. I think that because when people show you their gun collection (as they do from time to time), they point out which ones are rare, valuable, special edition, etc. It's not as bad as grown-ups with collections of Star Wars shit still in the original packaging, but it's pretty bad.
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Internet is down, might not be able to post for a while.
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Thinking a bit more on this, there are vast numbers of mostly older men with huge collections of guns and their children are, statistically speaking, not as likely to be interested in them. If enough of these collections get sold at once, that would drop the price of guns by quite a bit. Plus, you might get interesting things like crack addicts robbing convenience stores with chrome-plated Desert Eagles.
Guess what. The overwhelming majority of injuries were gunshot wounds. Shocker, I know.
This seems... unlikely. A plurality maybe? Even so, the hospital visit stats I'm looking at put firearms well under falls and on a par with traffic accidents.
The difficult thing is the second amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court. I don't think any really serious gun control is ever going to happen until the second amendment is repealed, which will occur about the twentieth of never.
No, this is bullshit. Heller and McDonald left plenty of room for FAR more stringent gun regulation than we have in all but a few places. Sure, the Court as currently composed might push Heller out further in the next cases, or it might not--they've turned down some opportunities to do so; and of course the Court won't be composed like this forever. Legislators who act as if their hands are tied by the Second Amendment are full of shit.
The Supreme Court has found for an individual right, but not an absolute one, no? Besides the regular background checks, which even at best can only accomplish so much, I think there are a number of new regulatory directions we can go down that don't clash.
Going down financial and supply routes seems especially appropriate, since there's no positive right to be able to afford a gun. Insurance? Taxation? Impact fees? Manufacturing quotas? How much of annual income did a gun cost in 1789, anyway?
Owner-responsibility laws (saying that you have to secure your guns and report them to police if they are stolen) are what the NRA seems to be really worried about in this state. I'm pretty sure those haven't been declared unconstitutional. In fact, 20 years ago, I think the NRA would have supported them or at least not been opposed. Now they don't want to block straw purchases.
There was a report yesterday in the local paper on domestic violence. Apparently, men shoot, women use knives. To kill abusers, it seems.
In better news, Neil Young in concert right now is way way better than you imagine. He's spent 40 years tinkering with arrangements for Down by the River and I think he's about got it. The Monsanto stuff is fun too. West Coast dates for the rest of the month.
Anyway, if the Pirates win the wildcard game, I have a constitutional right to fire into the air as an act of celebration.
85: Sorry, I spoke imprecisely. The overwhelming majority of the kinds of injuries she was studying. I think the parameters were something like ER visits, to a major city hospital, with injuries that had some specified level of trauma or impairment. I don't remember the details, but it definitely wasn't too convoluted -- you don't have to do a lot of work to get a large group of patients to study. In Philadelphia (and probably Chicago, maybe Baltimore too) if you pick the right hospital you're going to see a lot of firearms-related injuries.
Thinking a bit more on this, there are vast numbers of mostly older men with huge collections of guns and their children are, statistically speaking, not as likely to be interested in them.
Is this true, though? I haven't seen any particular signs that (a subset of) younger men are less likely to be as obsessed with guns as older ones.
I can't for certain separate out an aging effect from a cohort effect, but younger people (even through middle age) are less likely to have guns than the elderly.
If nothing else, the decline of unions and pensions means the younger generation of the gun-crowd here just doesn't have as much disposable income as the people who are already elderly.
92: maybe the younger generation prefer to lease them rather than own them, as they do with music, films, cars...?
Startup idea: Uber For Guns.
95.2: That was a thing, pre-internet. Enterprising but less violent criminals would lease guns to those who could not get them. The deposit would be the cost of the gun and if the gun was returned without being fired, you'd get the deposit back minus the rental fee. If it was fired, you'd get the gun and lose the deposit.
Visiting my mother at my sister's while my sister was out of town last month gave me a chance to catch up with the NRA's journal, American Hunter, which I'd known in my adolescence from collected old issues going back into the fifties as American Rifleman
I suppose it's normal for pressure groups to focus on threats rather than accomplishments, but the NRA's extraordinary success in the last few years in shutting down any encroachment in the face of massive public support for some action—which I admit would be too dissonant for them to acknowledge even obliquely—was nowhere mentioned.
But the immanent threat to all that Americans hold dear from Hillary Clinton and Mike Bloomberg? "Hysterical" would be too weak a word for that coverage.
58...I can't see how an honest look at the situation would come to a different conclusion.
Luckily we've got the other kind of look available too!
92. Here's my optimistic claim for this: Guns are a marker of rural identity the way fancy coffee or wearing this year's fashions are of urban identity. Rural population fraction and rural identification are waning.
Also, even though rural fashions change more slowly than city ones, they do change-- Carhartt's didn't exist 20 years ago for instance. The fashion for guns can change too.
They changed the name from American Rifleman because they like the ambiguity of "American hunter."
The current legal precedent leave more than enough room for a very tightly regulated gun control regime. What makes me pessimistic, other than this being a political dead end for my entire lifetime, is that we're awash in a sea of guns already and we have federalism and Mexico. When big cities and even some states tried gun-sale bans, buybacks, and increased penalties for gun crimes the results didn't seem to do much. I do think things like assault weapon bans and highly restrictive background checks and bans on gun possession by those under treatment for mental illness (these have their own constitutional, statutory, and logistical issues, but) have a decent chance of cutting down on the lone wolf insane school shooters that we've seen every six months or so, and we should definitely do that, but I'm extremely skeptical that we'll ever actually get rampant gun violence out of American society.
Carhartt's didn't exist 20 years ago for instance.
Hipster. Carhartts certainly existed 20 years ago. Farmers were wearing them when I was a kid.
30: You reminded me of my own grade school textbook's coverage of the civil war and reconstruction. It's amazing how uncritically the "carpetbaggers and scallywags" narrative was presented. And this was in a public school in Southern California.
I think 99.1 is right though. Except that I think it won't fade that quickly because those who leave rural areas tend to be more gun-fancying than those who stay in them. As with international immigrants, the first generation can tend to react to its surroundings by being more of whatever people were back home than the people back home. They could be a lag is what I'm saying.
There could be a lag is what I am saying.
Trying to think about gender breakdowns of people injured by guns seems really complicated to me -- you've got at least three big categories that are going to have different gender dynamics. First, you have to figure that a large portion of the people injured by guns are people who are on some level participants in criminality; being the sort of person who engages in violence is going to make your risk of being the subject of violence skyrocket. Then you've got people who could be described as impersonal crime victims -- people who are injured during criminal activity that they aren't meaningfully participants in (and those categories are going to bleed into each other at the margins, e.g. where you have someone who isn't themselves engaged in violent criminal activity, but with strong social connections to people who are, their risk of being victimized is going to be way higher than, say, mine, in my safe little middleclass bubble). And then you have domestic violence/acquaintance violence.
And the gender dynamics for all three of those categories are going to be totally different. The first category is going to be disproportionately male, because it's going to match the demographics for violent criminals generally. The other two categories are less obvious, but I would be shocked if they weren't at least closer to fifty-fifty. But you'd need to break them apart to do anything useful about figuring out gender breakdowns, and you'd need to be really clear about how you were defining your categories.
104 explains why the couple from Yorkshire who live upstairs from me insist on keeping 250 sheep in their spare room.
One thing that's fascinating about the NRA/Gun Movement in general is that their biggest goal is to sell a picture where guns are both totally safe not a big deal just innocent fun things that make a loud noise hahahaha!* and simultaneously that the world is a dangerous place where Bad Guys are Coming For You And Your (cough-white-cough) Wife With Their Guns and only a HUGE ARSENAL can possibly save you and those around you!**
You'd think they'd have to stick with one of those two, but this is America! which means you can manage both at once (sometimes literally simultaneously).
*Hence, why we must never ever have laws that treat guns as if they were seriously dangerous weapons because that might remind people that that's what they are. Goofing around with shotguns while drunk is a lot less fun if you have to fill out a lot of forms on a regular basis all of which make very clear that you have something very very dangerous.
**Which is why we have an endless industry of people talking about "Home Protection" from "Urban Home Invaders". And a lot of people who are, deep down, very cowardly carrying weapons around in public (usually concealed) because it lets them fantasize about being noble heroes who protect the people around them from the dangers that those people are too naive to grasp.
106: You left out accidents, which are really common even leaving aside criminal activity.
Goofing around with shotgun while drunk is objectively fun. And safer than goofing around with handguns while drunk.
Oh, right, and that's going to be another different gender breakdown again. (Offhanded guess, skewing male adolescent?)
And safer than goofing around with handguns while drunk.
This seems to me to fall into the category of statements that are true, but not useful.
Also, yes, but with a disturbing number of per-adolescent kids.
114: Some favor harm reduction strategies while others are prohibitionist.
I suspect the age thing is largely a function of the fact that there are two very distinct groups of gun owners in the country. There are the people like a bunch of my older relatives who own one or two guns, usually for very specific purposes (hunting; varmints; scaring the crows away from his house during family reunions without warning people (it was great); etc.). And there are the terrifying gun loons who own mass arsenals and like to play army. The former group is dying off, and has been for a while,* to the point where there are genuine problems in parts of the country because too few people are still active hunters, and the normal game animals are starting to take over in ecologically harmful ways. The latter group probably isn't growing much, but at this point I believe the majority of guns out there are owned by these kinds of loons, which is why fake-military-assault-rifle type guns tend to advertised more than boring-old-bolt-action-30.06 rifles.
*The only person in my family that I know owns a gun and doesn't have grandchildren works as a naturalist managing wolf populations in Montana, so he has an excuse. Everyone else, including the people who grew up hunting, have either moved to cities/suburbs (most of them) or just plain found other things to do, probably because no one else their age hunts anyway.
Hunting is great until you get to the point where you have a dead animal that you've got to figure out how to turn into an entree. With deer, you can pay somebody to wrap it all up in paper, like normal meat. Birds are harder.
On the other hand, a dead bird is closer to something you might buy in a grocery store than a dead deer. If someone handed me a dead duck and told me to have it ready for dinner in a couple of hours, I'd be intimidated but I think I'd manage. A dead deer, on the other hand, would be a much bigger problem.
Luckily, I have arranged my life such that neither is ever likely to happen to me.
From that video, which is mostly people not realizing that guns have recoil, occasionally people having terrifyingly near misses*, and (and this is why maybe people shouldn't watch much past the starting point) at least one where a small kid draws his dad's concealed weapon and accidentally shoots him with it, I'm guessing that a lot of the dumbass-gun-stuff is actually mid-twenties to late middle aged guys. You need some real disposable income to do something dangerously stupid with a gun.
*I love the clip I linked to though because the man is shooting at bottles that are seriously maybe ten feet away at best and still only manages fifty percent accuracy, with a pump action shotgun. Even if he isn't drunk no one in a state where that can happen should be anywhere near a gun.
...to the point where there are genuine problems in parts of the country because too few people are still active hunters, and the normal game animals are starting to take over in ecologically harmful ways.
I think it's more that suburban and exurban development has created reasonably good habitat in places where you can't hunt for fear of hitting a person.
I would assume that pretty much all adolescent stupid gun accidents is guns owned by the adolescents' parents.
120: don't tempt me. I'm sure Amazon could sort that out.
95: criminals do that here on Knifecrime when they need more than knives.
By the way:
Carhartt's didn't exist 20 years ago for instance
isn't even true in terms of fashion vs. utility. In 1997 The Face was already taking the piss out of people who went to clubs in head-to-foot Carhartt.
118: From what I know the trick is to have like four friends with trucks and a standing agreement that if one of you happens to come across, say, an elk and kill it you can call them up and they'll get over (roughly) to where you are and help you quarter it and get it home. Also you need a lot of chest freezers.
That said I'm told that two elk or so will last you till the next elk season and you won't need to go buy much red meat if any that year.
119: Don't forget to take all the little bit of lead out.
126: isn't that what Mark Duggan had done just before SCO19 caught up with him?
A notable aspect of this latest shooting spree is that they guy seems to have been egged on by trolls at 4chan. I wonder if any of them are considering that maybe it wasn't so funny after all.
The regionally-famous butcher shop on the outskirts of a small Wi. city, where we make a point of stopping to stock up whenever we're there, has a sign out front advising hunters to bring their kills around back.
I have no idea what they charge, but wouldn't it be hundreds to dress and butcher a deer? I'm sure the butcher is a valuable source for statistics, and to identify disease—the hunter-kill functions must be isolated from the regular ones for everyone's protection. I haven't seen roadside tagging stations like the DNR used to set up for years, but I'm sure they still exist.
Old school was to have your deer draped and tied across the roof of your ordinary sedan, driven back to Illinois and presumably done less exploitedly by a butcher here. Haven't seen that in a few years but may not be on the road the appropriate week: the rifle season is very short, but may need to be lengthened if the trend mentioned above, of population loss among hunters continues.
The sort of people who egg on this kind of thing on 4chan? I'd be surprised if a plurality of them weren't high fiving each other over it.
I doubt its hundreds to butcher a deer, but I admit I haven't priced it out.
A lot* of hunters in MN used to (it was illegal for a while and I don't know if that has changed back) donate most of the carcasses to the local food banks. So the butchering probably consisted of not much more than cutting off the bits they did want and signing over the rest to people who would take care of everything else for themselves.
*Quite possibly most: it was a super common thing.
You aren't supposed to eat the brain anymore. Maybe that was just squirrels.
I have no idea what they charge, but wouldn't it be hundreds to dress and butcher a deer?
Out here it's pretty reasonable. A few years old but gives you an idea of what to expect.
http://meiersmeat.blogspot.com/
The big thing out in the field is to get the skin off and get the meat into sub 40F temps as quick as possible.
Conveniently, outside is often sub 40F on the first day of deer season.
Honestly, gun control despair plus thinking about having freezers full of elk meat makes me think I should get into elk hunting. I've only been hunting once and it was for a "turkey shoot" that was a political fundraiser. I did not actually shoot any turkeys. And, aside from summer camp, I've been to a gun range exactly once, though it was with a guy who now leads an armed militia movement, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.
Elk are usually inconveniently located. You should probably start with deer.
One of our friends in NM used to go elk hunting with a bow and arrow. It sounded like a lot of work.
In Cleveland, you don't even have to leave you backyard in order to hunt deer. I don't know about the legality of shooting them there though. Maybe you could claim they were trespassing?
Elk may be difficult to hunt compared to other things too, I don't know. The cousin in question is weirdly attuned to the natural world in ways that make it hard to generalize from "oh we usually get around two elk a season" to "normal experienced hunters could reasonably expect to get an elk if they worked hard at it". Probably you could, though.
I'm not sure there are many in LA though. And the commute to Montana may be a bit much.
142: "Officer I swear I thought it was a black man..."
Here you go. You can fly into Omaha and rent a car. It's about four hours driving.
145 -- "varmint hunting" and "varmint calling" can apparently be done "at your own discretion."
MH, serious question: have you ever said the word "varmint" non-ironically and without implied quotation marks?
I have not. Nor did anybody use the word when I was growing up, except when quoting Loony Toons. I know people who do use it non-ironically, buy they are all from Kentucky and such.
Also it seems kinda pricey. Hundreds of dollars to get a "prairie chicken"? That sounds lame. I guess that's what you do with all the money you're saving on the mortgage and by not shopping at Whole Foods.
The locals would never pay that much. They just go shoot something.
Anyway, that type of business didn't exist when I was growing up. I don't know where they get the clients. Probably mostly Omaha.
What is "varmint calling"? You make sounds like a squirrel? I can do that at home for free.
Whatever it is, I'm pretty sure the point is to make the call and then shoot something that answers the call. Don't do that at home.
We should have an Unfogged guided hunting trip meet-up. That would be the best.
Now I'm assuming there's one of us you want to kill and make it look like an accident.
156: Moose-hunting in Alaska by hovercraft, once the Supreme Court stops the NPS from banning it.
That description sure makes it sound like a cert-worthy case. All hovercraft-hunting matters from anywhere in the nation should be directly appealable to the Supreme Court.
159 Paving the way for our Unfogged hunting by ekranoplan meetup. With falconry.
Sure, the falconry expert wants falconry. Does McManus get to hunt with his dogs?
160: definitely. And falcons graded according to status per the Boke of St Albans, obviously. From founder members (eagle or merlin) all the way down to lurkers (kestrel) and Pauly Shore (rubber chicken).
I mean, why not. Ekranoplan hunting barge in, say, northern Canada. Kills by falcon, gun, dog, katana sword, knife, Witt's library nunchucks, bat, atlatl, stand mixer, or any other blog-appropriate method. "Most dangerous" prey as appropriate.
Lot of elk in my neighborhood, and Fish & Game is pretty aggressive in trying to set up special hunts. Deer come into my yard pretty much every day. We've been having bears in our subdivision for the last month or two, which can be unnerving.
Wolves, though, are a great solution to elk overcrowding.
We don't hunt, but lots of people we know do. My son was talking about going out for an elk this year, but I was pretty sure he wouldn't get the bureaucratic part handled in time.
Ekranoplan hunting barge
I am imagining something like the vehicle used by Jabba the Hutt in "Return of the Jedi".
Also it seems kinda pricey. Hundreds of dollars to get a "prairie chicken"?
That site is insane. 2K for a godamn whitetail? Two grand is a standard rate here for a cow elk hunt with a guarantee harvest. 3500-6000K up in northern Utah/southern Idaho will get you various bison hunts.
You don't use dogs to hunt elk, just mountain lions.
I'd pay to watch Tigre wrestle a mountain lion.
148: Yes, especially by those exact relatives. Old people who grew up on farms absolutely will use that word - it's just another version of 'vermin'. And 'varmint gun' is actually a general category of guns (small caliber, generally, like 22LR).
Apparently old habits die hard, too, because they definitely kept killing stuff well after most of them moved away from contexts where it was necessary. I mowed lawns for my grandfather for a while when I was a kid (middle school age, roughly), and every so often I'd have to make little detours around crow parts. I suppose for some people it ends up kind of personal.
"Varmint gun" is where I first heard the word used non-ironically, but that was after I'd moved to Ohio.
Wikipedia says it's a regional term, though. It's something you see, apparently, in the Eastern US but not much outside of it (which is a huge area, I mean, starting at like the western edge of Indiana or something) so there's that.
This thread is reminding me of one of the best steaks I ever had. Appalachian red deer at a former hunting lodge turned fancy hotel in Canada.
I didn't shoot the deer myself, though. So I guess I missed out on the authentic deer eating experience.
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I am at a library in a low/moderate-income neighborhood. There are two people sitting in the computer lab area with me, both looking at paper newspaper Help Wanted ads, and both making phone calls on flip phones to prospective employers. It is both bizarrely anachronous and really sad.
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132: Yup, looks about like that.
Someone is apparently claiming that he was asking people if they were Christians and killing the ones who said yes but not the other ones. I... have trouble believing that, given how many times I've heard that rumor following mass shootings. But apparently it's from someone who was there at the time so who knows.
It's funny, I'm only two generations removed from the rural midwest (grandparents grew up there, though in small towns not on farms, and they moved) but I don't think they ever owned guns and they certainly didn't consider guns an identity totem, though they liked to identify as small-town midwestern folks in the big city. I suspect my distant relatives from the same part of the family who fled the "Iowa Riviera" of Long Beach, CA for Idaho probably have guns now, but that's just based on assumptions about white people who flee Southern California for Idaho.
My sister's friend got all inspired by Pollan's book and went pig hunting. Went out once, spent the whole day in that heightened awareness, never saw a pig. The second time, he woke up, saw pigs on the front lawn of the cabin and shot one.
He brought it to the butchering class at the local community college and was stymied when the butchers asked him what cuts he wanted. He had no idea. He hadn't thought of that.
His second take-away was that it was incredibly satisfying to eat and provide the meat he'd killed to friends. Like, he thought he'd enjoy that part and when it actually happened, the enjoyment was way more intense than he expected.
AISIMHB, I had a shotgun briefly in the early 80s. Traded it for a waterbed. Which is in my garage -- I should put one of those free to good home ads on Craigslist. It'll be gone in half an hour . . .
156: I'm sort of morbidly fascinated by the idea of an unfogged hunting trip. It sounds like it would make the basis for a great found footage horror movie.
My close relative who is a champ sharpshooter (used to be on a military team) and has in the past hunted javelinas with a crossbow has gotten more and more no kill over the years and is now a fly fishing guide who while technically open to letting the clients keep their catch I suspect in practice there are no trout fry ups out of his boat. So the supply of delicious venison has dried up. But if anyone is looking for an excellent fly fishing experience I hear he is really great!
Just great. Being hauled out of the water by my lip every few weeks is certainly a huge improvement over the quick death thing.
I know someone who wrote a movie about sharpshooters.
Someone is apparently claiming that he was asking people if they were Christians and killing the ones who said yes but not the other ones. I... have trouble believing that, given how many times I've heard that rumor following mass shootings. But apparently it's from someone who was there at the time so who knows.
That was probably after his initial queries of "Are you a chad?" "Are you a femtard?" "Are you an SJW?" were met with confusion.
Hundreds of dollars to get a "prairie chicken"?
Prairie chickens are considered a threatened species, so, yeah, it costs more to kill them for fun. You know, supply and demand.
The great panda was hunted out of Nebraska.
I have to admit, I'm surprised at how well Trevor Noah is doing on his first week on The Daily Show This bit is pretty inspired.
180: But will the hunting trip also include a sex grotto?
In Nebraska, there's a sex grotto behind every panda.
188 -- yes, but on the ekranoplan hunting barge it will be referred to as the "rutting room."
Speaking of mass shooting and rumors, the sheriff who responded to the Oregon shooting was
a Sandy Hook truther.
191: I saw a quote by that guy saying that he wouldn't name the killer because he didn't want to him to get the media attention he clearly craved. I thought, fair enough, it's a common sentiment, but it rubbed me the wrong way. Hubris, maybe, to think he could stop the name from getting out? Or too autocratic, considering that the name will be a matter of public record? Or maybe a bit obtuse, about what actually motivates spree killings?
Nice to know my gut reaction is reliable!
Moose-hunting in Alaska by hovercraft, once the Supreme Court stops the NPS from banning it.
Even if they don't it'll still be legal on state land. I'll totally hook you guys up.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God, on a hovercraft in Alaska.
193: ? Isn't there a solid body of research that links notoriety with copycats? What is obtuse about believing that name repetition will encourage others?
Was he not repeating it or not releasing it at all?
191: Good to know the investigation is in safe hands.
Not that there was ever any doubt, of course. Because when sheriffs are chosen by popular election, what could go wrong?
I'm going on "a shoot" in a couple of hours (I'm awake now thanks to jetlag). This is the British version, where you stand in a line dressed in silly clothes and beaters drive the game over you in an entirely unsporting way. Per 108 etc, there's always a startling amount of drinking involved.
Should be mostly partridge today and I'm very out of practice, using an antique shotgun that's too small for me. So really it's a very expensive way of saving a few birds.
When you gentlemen were huntin' and shootin', I was shuntin' and hootin'.
199: As parodied in The Magic Christian : "The old values are crumbling."
And taken to its logical conclusion in Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
Such a great movie that, but can we do Fitzcarraldo instead? We must have music.
Is Klaus Kinski in it? I've never seen either movie. I'm just going by his picture on the wikipedia page for Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
Fitzcarraldo has a paddle steamer, which for magnificence and impracticality rivals the ekranoplan.
The wikipedia entry for Fitzcarraldo is entertaining reading:
Herzog notes that the native extras were greatly upset by the actor's [Kinski's] behavior...Herzog says that one of the native chiefs offered in all seriousness to kill Kinski for him, but that he declined because he needed the actor to complete filming.
Klaus Kinski is the ultimate "any conceivable story about him sounds plausible" person. Klaus Kinski had a three-way with Andre the Giant and the President of Ecuador? Maybe! He lived in a hollow tree for a month and drank nothing but goat's blood? Not impossible!
My favorite line in My Best Fiend, Werner Herzog's documentary about his relationship with Kinski, is when he says, "every gray hair on my head I call Kinski."
I just finished reading his wikipedia entry and it gets a little past creepy.
210 reminds me that I haven't used my favorite line* from High Art, which is, when somebody says something, the more innocuous the better, you reply with "Do you have any idea what a fucked-up thing that is to say to me right now?" Never fails. Hilarious.
*My second favorite line is, of course, "Fassbinder's dead, Grete," which is how 210 made me think of it.
As temporary, assistant youth soccer coach, I have come to the conclusion that kids are assholes.
Doesn't every anti-war organization eventually just devolve into a t-shirt sales racket? It will be a great day when garment workers get all the pay they deserve and Dov Charney has to hold a bake sale to buy a sexual harassment lawsuit.
The best thing that I heard about Fitzcarraldo was that the steamer Herzog found was actually larger than the original. So in recreating the feat for cinema, he simultaneously exceeded it.
I'm also fond of the story of the monkeys at the end of Aguirre
[Sorry in advance if this comes out as a triple or something - my phone refuses to behave itself]
Kinski sounds mentally ill, but he retained a measure of insight: "He turned down a role in Raiders of the Lost Ark, describing the script as "moronically shitty"."
It had many, many moments, each worse than the one before.
You should have tried to see it when you were ten.
While I know perfectly well that he was almost certainly being offered a different role, I'm really enjoying imagining a version of Raiders of the Lost Ark that had Kinski playing Indiana Jones.
I've gone one better than that: I'm imagining a version of the 1980s in which Klaus Kinski played the lead in every summer blockbuster. Klaus Kinski in Top Gun! Klaus Kinski in Dirty Dancing! Klaus Kinski in Ghostbusters! (Also starring Steven Berkoff and John Hurt)
re: 202
My only memory of that film, from a late night confused Channel 4 watching as a teenager, is ... Raquel Welch.
222 I think any 80s summer blockbuster could be improved by having Klaus Kinski in the lead. Pity the poor film crew though. And it's a damn shame we've been deprived of the Klaus Kinski / Gary Busey buddy film we all so desperately needed and never knew it.