Monday, January 30, 2012

And It's Not Just the Shooting of People That Is A Problem

Anyone here want to bet that the shootists who do these probably don't think of themselves as criminals.  They might even think of themselves as law abiding, because they don't take this crime seriously.

Just as it is people with guns in our parks who did the damage to those very old, very valuable saguaro cacti, another crime that harms all of us, in an article posted here.  It is precisely the gun culture of our country which engages in these kinds of shootings, as well as the frequent shooting of people, which correctly characterizes our gun culture as trigger happy violence pursuing uncivilized people falsely throwing around the words rights, and freedom.

Whoever is doing these shootings should not only spend time behind bars, they should lose their guns and the ability to own or shoot guns.

From MSNBC.com and the AP last month:

Reports of sea lion shootings on rise in Calif.

The NOAA said there were 43 reported marine mammal shootings in 2009 — nine more than in 2008


By JASON DEAREN
updated 1/2/2011 11:58:39 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO — The weak and woozy California sea lion found on a San Francisco Bay-area beach in December with buckshot embedded in its skull has become an all-too-common sight for wildlife officials.

Wildlife officials have seen a slight rise in the shooting of ocean mammals in recent years, and investigators often struggle to find a culprit. There are few witnesses to such shootings, making it nearly impossible to bring a case.

"We always try to do an investigation, but unless there's an eyewitness to the shooting it's hard to make a case for our enforcement folks," said Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who tracks reports of the shootings.

The NOAA said there were 43 reported marine mammal shootings in 2009 — nine more than in 2008 and 14 more than five years earlier. Of the reported shootings in 2009, all were sea lions. And officials say many more cases likely go unreported.
Wildlife officials say sea lion and human populations continue to increase, making interaction more common, especially among fishermen who compete for the same food and often view the creatures as a nuisance.
Though NOAA and the California Department of Fish and Game are responsible for investigating these cases, few cases result in prosecution. Recent public outcry over highly publicized cases like that of the wounded sea lion near San Francisco have brought more attention to these shootings.
Veterinarians at the Marine Mammal Center in Suasalito are treating the wounded critter in the hope an aquarium or zoo will take it. The 7-foot-long male, dubbed Silent Knight by its rescuers, is now blind and cannot return to the wild.
When there is a witness, there usually is a case. A witness came forward after the 2009 shooting of a 650-pound sea lion nicknamed Sgt. Nevis was covered by local press and television.
Larry Legans of Sacramento was ordered to pay more than $51,000 in restitution for the cost of treating the critter, who recently underwent plastic surgery at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom to close bullet holes in its muzzle. Legas also spent a month in jail and got five years probation.
Lt. Rob Roberts, a warden with state Fish and Game Department, said the agency takes marine mammal shootings very seriously, and noted that reports have increased in kind with the growth of the sea lion population along the Northern California coast.
Roberts hopes successful prosecutions and intense media coverage of cases like Legans' will help.
"If the general public sees that there's recourse and accountability, that's a deterrent," Roberts said.
The Marine Mammal Center, where Silent Knight is being treated along with hundreds of ocean animals suffering a variety of ailments, has treated nine gunshot victims in 2010. The center treated 18 in 2009, down from a high of 72 sea lions in 1992, when the center started keeping statistics.
While the number of mammals treated for gunfire wounds has trended downward at the center over the decades, in recent years it has begun to creep back the other way, statistics show.
On Monday, more than 400 people came to see Silent Knight during the center's visiting hours, fascinated by the plight of the wounded pinniped, said Jeff Boehm, the center's executive director.
The center tries to help wardens in the investigations by determining the kind of weapon that were used and how long an animal has been wounded. For now, the center will work to try and get Silent Knight healthy, and ready to live in captivity.
"We've seen over 1,000 patients in 2010, and of that number only nine were shooting victims, a small fraction," said Boehm, whose center studies and treats animals that have been injured by fishing nets, disease or environmental hazards like pollution.
"But it's dramatic, because (shootings) are entirely unnecessary situations."
 and this one from BBC News:

Sea lions found shot on Puget Sound, US officials say

Sea lions (file photo) Fishermen regard sea lions as pests because they prey on salmon
 
Eight sea lions have been found shot dead in the US state of Washington in the past few weeks, wildlife officials have told a local TV station.
The bodies of seven sea lions with bullet wounds were recently found on the Nisqually River, KING-TV reports.
An eighth sea lion was found dead in West Seattle on 23 January. The Seal Sitters conservation group said it, too, had been shot.
Fishermen regard sea lions as pests because they prey on salmon.
The Seal Sitters say the eighth dead animal was a California sea lion, a mature male. The species is protected under the US Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Map
"Evidence of a 'penetrating' wound, suspected to be that of a bullet, was found deep in the tissue and tracked back to the entrance wound," the Seal Sitters said on their blog.
The sea lion's remains were analysed by a biologist from the Washington Department of fish and wildlife.
The examination also revealed a wound from a shark bite and the sea lion's intestines were twisted, the Seal Sitters said.
One of the animals found on the Nisqually River was a Steller sea lion, protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Both the state Department of Fish and Wildlife and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are investigating the deaths, KING-TV reports.
"California sea lions are sometimes viewed as a nuisance by commercial fishermen and there are records of stranded sea lions with gunshot wounds and other human-caused injuries," the NOAA says on its website.
 

9 comments:

  1. This is not the fault of our gun culture. As was stated in the report, it's more likely a conflict between wildlife needs and the needs of fishermen. Rather than look for a solution to the actual problem, you seek more gun regulation. How surprising.

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    Replies
    1. Well, it does comment on the ridiculous claim that most gun owners are safe and responsible. This, like the shot-up road signs, puts the lie to that one.

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    2. The actions of the few comment on the many? So if one black guy mugs me. . . Surely that's not what you want to say.

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    3. The actions of the many who shoot up parks, animals, signs, who have near misses that are not statistically noted anywhere, the instances of intimidation, drunken poor judgment, etc. combined with the truly horrendous statistics relating to guns in this country are indicative of the many commenting on the many when taken in their entirety.

      Particularly when weighed against the relatively minor benefit.

      It's sort of like the way that slavery benefited the few slave owners and the black birder slave traders. But the overall cost to the slaves, and subsequently to the agricultural failure of that way of life more than offset the benefits to those few.

      We have outrageously high costs to our society because of the gun culture, and like the slave owners, any claimed benefits are mostly toxic,or in the case of the rare legitimate instance of gun violence, which could nearly always be better accomplished by other means, those few cased do not form a basis for continuing the gun culture.

      And once again we have a problem with what you pass off as thinking.

      If one black guys mugs you? You would need to show that race was a substantive factor in wherever you were going with that.

      Mikeb on the other hand used a very good basis for his statement, by contrast, in demonstrating that gun owners do stupid, dangerous, destructive and costly things with their firearms, often.

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    4. My point is that we cannot judge an entire group by the actions of a few. Your side loves to append "law abiding" to every gun owner that you discuss here, but the stories that you cite give plenty of indication that the people involved were often criminals whose activities finally elevated them to the attention of reporters. Rather than applying collective punishment to all gun owners, work on keeping the bad actors off the streets. People who keep committing violent crimes need to spend enough time behind bars to age out of such behavior. (If we decriminalize drug use, we'll have plenty of room in prisons.) Your solution is an indiscriminate ban on a class of objects; mine is a targeted punishment of bad actions.

      Since you keep raising the subject of slavery, you need to explain how my guns are harming anyone. I haven't shot any person during the time that I've owned firearms. Nor have I shot endangered animals, rare cacti, or street signs. Slavery was a direct and continuous harm to human beings. You fear that my guns might harm someone, but that's a different category.

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  2. Lessee, the Common Harbour Seal is considered a pest in the British Isles (and is commonly used for sporrans--but that's a whole 'nother issue). Even though there are quite a few of them and I truly appreciate the critters (in fact, when I think of Ulster, I think of the seals we saw whilst patrolling around Strangford Lough).

    Very few of them get shot in the UK--coincidence or is it the lower level of firearms ownership?

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    Replies
    1. So if one was to just club them over the head with a large bat it would be A OK?

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    2. "Very few of them get shot in the UK--coincidence or is it the lower level of firearms ownership?"

      So no seals get killed in the UK? A quick google search indicates that that certainly is not the case. In fact, it seems to be quite the problem in Scotland. So what's the difference if they are killed by guns or some other method?

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  3. Greg Camp blathers:

    "This is not the fault of our gun culture. As was stated in the report, it's more likely a conflict between wildlife needs and the needs of fishermen."

    Lots of fishermen have needs, the ones with the fucking gunz are killing the sealions. They're not being speared or caught with a spinning rig. They're being shot. The idiot that was arrested for doing this last year said the seal was taking "his" fish.

    A.) They're not his fish.

    B.) He was shooting a protected sea mammal.

    C.) You're still dumber than a box of rocks in the remedial mineralization class.

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