As a Black person and a woman, I’m pretty adept at identifying racist/sexist attitudes & behavior for myself… you know, from a lifetime of experiencing them first hand.
Since you offered, I would very much appreciate it if you edited your original comment.
Thanks
I mean, I’m only roughly conversant with firearms, and I know that the weapon of choice for varmints is the .22 varmint rifle. Small, cheap, easy. Very much the last weapon that any sort of measured gun control is going to target.
At least the discussion about these things for dealing with feral hogs had some (quite inflated) grounding in reality, as those can be large and aggressive.
It’s a really stupid example in many ways. An AR-15 round is not very wide, but does have a higher velocity (IANAGN, so please don’t @ me gun freaks; I’m close enough). I’m assuming he’s fantasizing about shooting something fairly close-range, so the higher muzzle velocity paired with a relatively short barrel brings makes this a dubiously appropriate weapon. They’re designed to stop a human, tear up their organs and be fairly accurate down range.
ETA: @eccentriccog & @mspie500, a .22 and an AR-15 round are the same diameter round at .223”/5.56 mm. The difference is the shape and powder charge. The casing of a .223 is much larger and carries much more powder, leading to a higher muzzle velocity and more “stopping power”. In other words, you’re absolutely right that a .22 round is more than enough to deal with pests (so is fencing, but these fuckers love to see blood). A .223 round has one purpose: murdering humans.
Done.
My father used a 30-30, which, granted, was a bit overkill for animals that size. But it’s what he had (because he didn’t need 17 different rifles and 5 billion rounds of 5.56 ammo).
I can’t even begin to wrap my head around what a complete and utter dumbass this guy is. I’ve raised chickens and have had to worry about raccoons. Guns of any sort - much less AR-15s - are the worst possible non-solution. Even if you killed every raccoon you saw, they’re still going to migrate in from somewhere. Raccoons wander large areas and come at night, when you’re asleep, and kill chickens without you even knowing. A simple solution is… keep the chickens in an enclosed pen where the raccoons can’t reach them. That’s it. That’s the only solution.
It’s like this dude is trying to come up with the most absurd possible justifications for having assault rifles. Next it’ll be something like, “Well sometimes, you might have this itch and…”
And with raccoons, any gun isn’t actually a solution. It’s dumb on so many levels.
And not just more effective, but, you know, the only thing that’s actually effective. Which makes this whole thing extra-confounding.
This. I keep chickens. I sometimes need to defend them. A .22 with short rounds works just fine. Wtf.
the weapon of choice for varmints is the .22 varmint rifle
and a lot harder to kill a human with
We use these live capture traps out here and they usually work fine except when a full grown very angry raccoon tries to rip that drop-door off, trying to escape. Not that I blame them, of course.
Any person claiming to protect chickens by tearing a massive hole in the mutually shared biome (like, shared with all living animals and plants that were doing fine before that chicken coop showed up) needs to understand a few things about the makings of sound, solid chicken coop construction. And mindfully cooping up the chickens at nightfall.
My chicken-keeping friends would agree, if for no other reason than staying up all night to shoot raccoons just to protect the flock is exhausting.
A good comparison is kinetic energy, since that includes mass of the projectile and velocity. AR rounds have ~8x the kinetic energy of a 22.
For the simple reason that the lower velocity is what kills them. The .22 is slow enough that it knocks them back and kills them. Its slowness is what causes the damage. A higher-velocity round just means the round passes through without killing and then ends up 3 counties away doing god-knows-what. Using a .223 is idiocy and borderline cruelty.
never even seen any raccoons on this island. what we have is a chicken problem! as i have carried on and on about in this forum.
now an AR might make for a messy dispatch for those feathered mongrels of mayhem, but i don’t actively murder the fowl beasties, preferring to “relocate” the ones i can live trap.
lady down the street with the “god, guns and trump” flag likely has a bloody arsenal (as she loudly proclaimed before the election “in case the demonrats tried to steal the election for Biden”), but she is not shooting varmints. i am of the opinion that she keeps guns to use them as intended…
to kill people.
I don’t think he really meant to add the first three letters of “raccoons”.
He doesn’t realize that if the government wanted his guns badly enough, they wouldn’t have a problem taking them (from his cold, dead hands if necessary.) In the words of Ron White, “… I don’t know how many of them it would have taken to whip my ass, but I knew how many they were going to use.” Between regular police officers, SWAT, national guard, or (in an extreme case) the military they have more than enough people and equipment to whip his ass six ways from Sunday.
Then you get this idiot. Who got his gun stolen from him shopping while open carrying
Over here, it is understood that killing a grey squirrel is pointless - it just creates a vacancy for another one. Same is true of racoons, I expect.
Yeah, also raccoons are quite good at hiding during the day. Even a concerted effort by quite a lot of people to wipe them out in an area never turns out very well - they’ve tried removing them from places they were (accidentally) introduced, and it hasn’t worked.
And unlike squirrels, that will only eat a fruit or two before you notice their returned presence, when it comes to raccoons and chickens, just one or two raccoons can wipe out a flock of chickens in a night - they don’t just kill for food in that situation, they kill them all. So even if you were lucky enough to see and kill all raccoons entering your area before they could do damage, that would only work until the next ones came along, which could be at any time, at which point the failure to protect would be total.
