Quote:
Originally Posted by TrentCrimmIndependent
The bear got put down anyways. So at the end of the day, what's better?
Two people, a dog and a bear deceased, or one dead bear?
Or even the potential outcome where the bear is scared off with a flesh wound (because "the shooter panics") and recovers, and every one goes home alive and well with no resources spent by the park to recover bodies from a gruesome murder scene.
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There is very little reason to believe a gun would have helped Doug and Jenny, and even less reason to believe they would have packed one. If we hear the necropsy comes back to capsicum residue on the bears face/fur/respiratory system then there might be a conversation (though you'd have to put odds at 50% that a gun was as accessible as the bear spray that was used vs. the can that was not).
I actually waded through accounts of the 8 incidents/11 fatalities I listed in national/provincial parks...this was the first time that there was any reference to bear spray at all.
So if you want to argue that guns might have helped in any of those cases, you'd also have to acknowledge that bear spray may have been similarly effective.
Put another way,
in 43 years there has been one fatal incident in Canadian parks where the victim had bear spray.
If you aren't inside a tent, you can make the statement that there has never been a fatal attack in Canadian parks where the victim had bear spray - ie.
no dayhiker carrying spray has ever been killed.
Of course we know that outside the parks there have been many fatalities, with and without guns and/or bear spray - but of course there are a bunch of caveats to this like the nature of the human activity. I think there may be only one other instance - a worksite in Alaska - where there was a fatality despite bear spray).
Guns are nowhere close to a silver bullet solution. A serious bear attack scenario is already incredibly rare. The odds are infinitesimal for a scenario where bear spray could be appropriately deployed and fail to work but a gun could be similarly deployed and save the situation. But I'd argue the odds of the reverse being true are probably at least as high.