strut asked me to send this below article
Are American hunters the world's largest standing army?I received the below news article from a friend:
Hunters --- Interesting
The world's largest army? America's hunters..
Strength of the 2nd Amendment..
I don't spend my fall weekends tramping around the woods in pursuit of
a buck, any more, but a lot of my friends and neighbors do.
This blogger adds up all the hunters in just a handful of states, and
comes to a striking conclusion:
The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without
someone getting killed. That's great. There were over 600,000 hunters.
Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth
largest army in the world - more men under arms than Iran; more than
France and Germany combined - deployed to the woods of a single
American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.
But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of
Pennsylvania this week. Michigan's 700,000 hunters have now returned
home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is
literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would
comprise the largest army in the world.
His point? America will forever be safe from foreign invasion with that
kind of home-grown firepower.
Hunting -- it's not just a way to fill the freezer. It's a matter of
national security.
But is any of this true? Well, I did a little more research into the number of hunters in the U.S, and here's what I found:
The NWTF press release states that "[m]any people believe that reporting there are 13 million hunters in this country is at least misleading and, at worst, a gross underestimation of their actual numbers." "That number only represents how many people over the age of 16 hunted during a one year period.... It does not include hunters under the age of 16, nor does it take into account those people who consider themselves hunters but for whatever reason, didn't hunt in 2001."
The release quotes Mark Damian Duda, Executive Director of Responsive Management, that "according to our research, about 28 million Americans consider themselves hunters, even though they don't hunt every year and some haven't gone for several years." (Emphasis ours.)
The NWTF press release also quotes Rob Southwick, president of Southwick Associates that "[t]he National Survey shows there are 43.7 million people in the United States who have hunted in any previous year. That number is three times more than the number of people reported as having hunted in 2001. That's significant." The NWTF release adds that researchers have "found that many people subscribe to the idea that once a hunter, always a hunter."
Wow. No wonder we've never been attacked on our own soil by armed troops.
As the above report says, " Hunting -- it's not just a way to fill the freezer. It's a matter of national security."
