guns

I appreciate your feedback, and you’re probably correct. Though, I did intend for it to be somewhat vague, I did not intend to signal support for sport hunting.

My intention with the ambiguity was quite literally to survey the community’s thoughts about hunting, and more specifically their feelings about hunters and their motivations. To that end, I feel like it was fairly successful.

Much of my curiosity is driven by the ever-increasing urban vs. rural sentiment in America (a story as old as civilization itself, I fear). I wonder, too, how many people in online spaces such as this one are city-dwellers, and how many reside in rural areas? I personally grew up in and currently live in a very rural area. Not being a landowner myself, I spend a fair amount of time on public land hunting and foraging. Many of the people I encounter are of no greater means than myself. A surprising number are immigrants who view it as a cost-effective means to provide for their families. Many are your typical white cis male, to be sure, but that’s not entirely the case.

Often when I see hunting come up in online, left-of-center oriented spaces, I see most people view the average hunter as landed gentry — petite bourgeois suburbanites. Though they represent a great number of hunters, in my own experience, they only make up a portion of the American hunting population. Certainly it is rare that I meet left leaning hunters, and I have yet to encounter one who outright claims to be a leftist.

I find this curious because these are supposed to be workers movements, yet, so many rural working class Americans are misrepresented in the discourse about them. I find it more curious, because I hear my own story reflected in the stories of my neighbors, and I wonder: how did we end up so ideologically opposed? Further, I wonder, how is it that the left (myself included) expects to motivate people to abolish capitalism, rectify settler-colonialism, and have any semblance of solidarity with one another when so much working class American culture is antithetical to both online and in-person leftist rhetoric.

Ugh. Long rant is long. Hope that clears things up.