> [...] if your young children are being swarmed by 30-50 feral hogs you probably aren't going to disappear into your house, unlock your gun safe, retrieve and load your gun then come back to their rescue 5 minutes later.
I may be misunderstanding your comment, but that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Retrieving a gun doesn't take 5 minutes.
Let t be the time at which the hogs arrive.
I can sprint from my basement to the top floor in a bit over 5 seconds. I can find something in a closet in about 5 more seconds. That's about 12-13 seconds to having a gun in my hands, but let's account for opening the gun safe and fumbling around for magazines. The clock is now showing t+30.
Let's now assume the gun isn't loaded. I'm probably a bit stressed by all of this, but almost anyone can load a magazine-fed rifle in 5 seconds. t+35s.
Now I have two choices:
1. Open the bedroom window (~3s), take aim (~2s) and fire. => t+40s
2. Sprint down to the ground floor (~3s), run out the back door (~2s), get into a shooting position (~3s), aim (~2s) and fire. => t+45s
A conservative estimate has me shooting hogs in 45 seconds. If I live in a place where this is a problem, I'm also likely to take steps to prepare. I might keep the gun safe in a more accessible place (e.g. the garage). I might store the firearm in the gun safe with a magazine already seated in the well. I might keep my eyes open and notice the hogs at a distance, giving me the time to fetch a gun sans the frenzy. In some parts of the world, it's common to keep a rifle at hand when outside.
I don't live in a part of the world where I have to deal with feral hogs, but this doesn't strike me as a "gratuitous excuse to shoot 30-50 feral hogs". Nor does it strike me as diagnostic of unsafe firearm handling, as others have suggested.
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EDIT
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The most worrying thing here is the idea of shooting in a place where little kids were running around/playing just moments ago. While this kind of situation can be handled safely, it's also where dramatic accidents tend to happen. A big problem with firearms handling is that it's a perishable skill. You forget. You get rusty.
> I might keep the gun safe in a more accessible place (e.g. the garage). I might store the firearm in the gun safe with a magazine already seated in the well.
In many U.S. states a gun safe or other secure storage isn't required. (And even when required people don't necessarily obey it.) Getting your gun might be as simple as grabbing it off the living room wall. It might even already be loaded. Even in households with children--that's why accidents happen.
I’m trying to come up with a thoughtful reply, but I can’t figure out how you managed to interpret my comment as “you should shoot at your kids, or otherwise handle firearms unsafely”.
Are you perhaps projecting onto me some ideas you have about the kinds of people who discuss guns?
Maybe because the whole premise of your hypothetical is how quickly you can start picking off hogs in the yard while the kids are out there? In what way would ANYONE consider it reasonable or safe to start shooting with kids in the range of fire?
I am definitely interpreting your lack of concern for small humans as someone who does not have kids nor understand their lack of ability to do whatever it is you think they should do when being shot at.
Your original comment discusses the time it takes to go from having no gun to being in a position to fire your gun at wildlife that has bypassed your garden fence. You make no mention of the time it takes to actually retrieve the children from the garden who are too small and not strong enough to fight their way past the enormous number of hypothetical hogs. Those children need to be picked up and carried to safety before you can unload into the sea of brown fur that 30 to 50 feral hogs would become if packed into a small garden. Ideally, if those hogs are violent and armed with tusks that could break an arm, you should be rescuing the small, weak, juvenile humans before taking any other action.
A hurt pig can turn into a really dangerous creature, will charge against any human, including children, so shooting them is the worst idea possible. Females are social. Killing one of the small pigs will 100% grant triggering a vicious attack from their mother and aunts. Just running towards the children and allow the pigs an escape route would be a much safer move.
The tale looks much more like an excuse to explain having a lot of furtive hunting in the fridge IMO.
I haven’t been confronted with feral pigs, so I’ll take you at your word. What I can say with great confidence is that it doesn’t take 5 minutes to get a gun, so the fact that someone manages to shoot pigs in their back yard doesn’t in itself point to furtive hunting.
It is strictly legal to hunt feral pigs any time of the day or night (!!), any time of the year, without permit in Arkansas, so long as it's on private property. You can even do it on public property if you have a generic hunting license, though there's time-of-year and time-of-day restrictions in that case.
There is no bag limit. You can even do it with night vision.
But yes, shooting pigs with small children playing nearby isn't good. I don't know the context, maybe it was very obvious that the kids all got safely inside and accounted for.
If it was Europe I would say 100% excuse to poaching. I had seen similar cases here of hunters claiming that there are too much wildboars so they must be granted a special permit to hunt more out of season. Cameras at the same time don't show the wildpigcalipse that newspapers claim
... but if is legal in US, is legal. Definitely unwise in any case.
If this is a concern in some areas, just a small stone wall around the kids's playing area would deter the pigs to enter. They do not jump very well.
> .. but if is legal in US, is legal. Definitely unwise in any case.
It is only legal in a handful of states, usually those with insane quantities of feral pigs.
In a lot of the US, it would be illegal. However in Arkansas where the person in question was, it was legal on private property.
In nearby Alabama or Louisiana you need a permit, likewise in California. So in those states it would have been illegal. In Arkansas, Texas, or Oklahoma, there's no permit.
In Texas, it's legal on public property even. Texas has a feral pig population nearing 2m, which causes almost (supposedly) half a billion dollars in damage annually. Or $50m. Or a billion. It depends on the study.
I think this relates to the specifics of the situation.
If you're on farmland, and you've ensured your family is in a safe place, it's pretty safe. The danger -- as I mentioned in a previous comment -- is that this kind of situational awareness is a perishable skill. If it's not being practiced (ideally by all parties involved), it's easy to make mistakes. It's definitely not like riding a bike.
I may be misunderstanding your comment, but that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Retrieving a gun doesn't take 5 minutes.
Let t be the time at which the hogs arrive.
I can sprint from my basement to the top floor in a bit over 5 seconds. I can find something in a closet in about 5 more seconds. That's about 12-13 seconds to having a gun in my hands, but let's account for opening the gun safe and fumbling around for magazines. The clock is now showing t+30.
Let's now assume the gun isn't loaded. I'm probably a bit stressed by all of this, but almost anyone can load a magazine-fed rifle in 5 seconds. t+35s.
Now I have two choices:
1. Open the bedroom window (~3s), take aim (~2s) and fire. => t+40s
2. Sprint down to the ground floor (~3s), run out the back door (~2s), get into a shooting position (~3s), aim (~2s) and fire. => t+45s
A conservative estimate has me shooting hogs in 45 seconds. If I live in a place where this is a problem, I'm also likely to take steps to prepare. I might keep the gun safe in a more accessible place (e.g. the garage). I might store the firearm in the gun safe with a magazine already seated in the well. I might keep my eyes open and notice the hogs at a distance, giving me the time to fetch a gun sans the frenzy. In some parts of the world, it's common to keep a rifle at hand when outside.
I don't live in a part of the world where I have to deal with feral hogs, but this doesn't strike me as a "gratuitous excuse to shoot 30-50 feral hogs". Nor does it strike me as diagnostic of unsafe firearm handling, as others have suggested.
-- EDIT --
The most worrying thing here is the idea of shooting in a place where little kids were running around/playing just moments ago. While this kind of situation can be handled safely, it's also where dramatic accidents tend to happen. A big problem with firearms handling is that it's a perishable skill. You forget. You get rusty.