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Gnomon, as someone who has spent 30 years of my adult life living in central Toronto and central Winnipeg, I couldn't agree more with your description of the divide of experience. Like you, I have many friends who, while not being opposed to our activities, are stunned to find out they know someone who engages in them. And for the most part they are curious and interested in a rational discussion.

I don't share King's negative long term view. I am more in line with your outlook.

The problem I have is with the group who, on this subject and many others, are determined to impose their values on the rest of us, by force if necessary. In Canada, despite King's suggestion that the media is simply reflecting the attitudes of the 99%, with intimate social knowledge ( they are long time friends) of some of the people who run our state owned national TV and radio network, the CBC, I know there is a definite sense by the people who produce the news that the larger population needs to be guided in the way they view certain subjects. And the guidence is in the direction of the liberal left.

Opposing viewpoints are considered and regularly decried as "American influenced" or indicative of being a "Western redneck". These terms are commonplace in discussions among the elites and in written commentary. We must respect for example gays and transgendered who choose to live an alternative lifestyle but it is completely okay to slam rural, western or those with "American" sensibilities.

The choice of what to report, the commentary that follows and general stance of the media does influence the attitudes and beliefs of those watching. We have seen it happen in North America over the last 40 or 50 years and I would suggest that believing otherwise is somewhat naive.

canvasback, I agree with your point of view. We're just going to have to suck it up and keep plodding along.

The qualifying words of my negative view of the future of the shooting sports were "as I know it."

Most of it is gone now, and becoming "more expensive and difficult to do," as forecast above.

A members' survey a while ago indicated our average age is somewhere in the 50s. Many never experienced real enjoyment of open spaces.

Well said, canvas. Same thing south of our common border - rural sensibilities seem to get trashed a lot by educated urbanites. Some PC has had a good effect and by and large idiots are no longer routinely portrayed as speaking with a southern drawl. We have to keep in mind, tho, that the far right has an equal, if not stronger contempt for what they perceive as liberal.

We have so many subtexts in our national discourse that I despair of ever finding some common ground - compromise has become a dirty word.

I think it's very interesting that your experience discussing the shooting sports with your urban friends mirrors mine - these people, by and large, are not reflexive "gun-grabbers"

A couple of points Gnomon.

Regarding the right having contempt. I don't deny it is there. It would be my opinion that the right's contempt is founded on the left's premise of trying to force their values on us. It is the left's demands that the state intrude unnecessarily in our lives. By and large the right just wants to be left in peace.

I too often despair of finding common ground. It's sad.

Finally and this is a positive. In the last five years I have had three different middle aged urbanites discover I am a hunter and at some point (especially when their wife isn't listening LOL) ask if I would teach them to handle and shoot a shotgun and then take them hunting.

This gives me cause to be more hopeful for the future than King has indicated. I believe there are many urbanites, raised in cities with no connection to the extraordinary beauty of the land or any visceral understanding about where their food comes from who, once they have had time to digest the concept, would jump at the chance to get out and learn how to enjoy the wild.

And I suppose it is that hopefulness for the future that causes my outrage at the misinformed, outright lying, money wasting antics of the true believers who seem to feel that any gun is a dangerous and evil product, regardless of whose hands hold it.

King, I believe I understood your qualifier. I'm about 30 years younger and it is vastly different already for me.

When I have referred to your comments on that specific topic, which I think I have now done twice, what I am really thinking is I wish there was something I could say or write that might cause you to be more hopeful that future generations will find some of the immense pleasure I know you and the rest of us have already found in the outdoors and the shooting sports (and fishing for that matter). It will be different but perhaps just as wonderful for them as it has been for us.

All is not yet lost!!

canvas, I will accept your comments regarding the right-wing in Canada since I do not know enough about Canada's social and political dynamics to comment but here in the US it seems to me (my opinion only) that the right wing is far more intrusive but they don't see anything wrong with it - for example the intravaginal ultrasound probes in Virginia.

And yes! A day at the range works wonders. I've taken many a firearm virgin out to the local range and invariably they had a good time.

We don't have the "religious right" as any kind of significant force, the way it appears to be in the US. Although we do have a lot of the political left accusing the right of dragging "religious beliefs" into the mix, just as the right will accuse the left is being "Stalinists". Yes, there are a few of each on both sides but, up here, neither epitaph is accurate or helpful when describing the mainstream on each side.

What we really have, in a simplistic way, is the divide between the urbanites residing primarily in the three largest urban areas, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver along with the political and bureaucratic classes from Ottawa against the smaller centres and rural populations along with what we call "the West" which for these purposes describes everyone living from Thunder Bay (just north of Duluth, MN.) all the way to Vancouver on the west coast, but not including Vancouver. I think you guys call it "fly over country".

Politicians from both sides have emphasized and exacerbated this divide for their personal gain over the last 30 years. Not a good thing.

canvas, there's something I never have understood - in a country with as much wilderness as Canada and relatively small (in terms of relative area) urban concentrations, why the gun antagonism? Same thing in Australia - it doesn't make sense.

I hadn't realized that you don't have a significant religious right (I suppose I never really thought about it) - it has indeed gotten weird in the US.

I'll try to answer your question briefly, but "briefly" isn't my strong suit. Lol

Much like Australia, the gun control lobby used a particular mass murder that happened in a college in Montreal I think in 1992 as the raison d'�tre for their cause. Some crazy guy went into the college and singled out women to shoot and kill. He killed 14 of them. Many were shot while police stood outside "securing" the building.

The anti gun crowd were able to leverage both the mass murder aspect of this with the gender specific targeting, to whip up the anti gun sentiment with the political class at the time. And the politicians felt compelled to be seen as "doing something". Didn't seem to matter that their choice of action would not have prevented the actions of the gunman in the case described. If one objected at the time, the memory of the dead women was evoked to shame the opposition into silence.

At the same time there was a notorious shooting in Toronto, where a late night dessert only restaurant was held up by armed gunmen who killed a couple of people. The shocker there was that traditionally Toronto was viewed as a very safe city and the location was a very safe part of town. I frequented the restaurant regularly with my wife and friends.

Illegal handgun violence was on the rise in the three large centres and both the public and the politicians were casting about wondering what was happening to nice, safe Canada.

In my earlier post I forgot to mention that the urban areas of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa comprise over 40% of the population of Canada. So the influence politically in terms of sheer numbers of elected officials coming from those locations is very significant.

The result was the passage of bill C68, which ramped up significantly gun control in many different ways, the long gun registry just being a small part of it. They prohibited many kinds of guns, including all hand guns of .25 and .32 calibers, created the licensing program for all gun owners, the long gun registry to go along with the hand gun registry which had been in place since the 1930s and onerous safe storage laws which to this date are so vague, and therefore very flexible from an enforcement standpoint, that even the courts today ave difficulty figuring them out. All non compliance with the new laws became criminal charges, rather than regulatory offenses.

In the last 20 years Canada has seen tremendous growth in most urban centres, big and smaller, of gang activity and violence. It is a new thing up here and law enforcement has been unable to stem the tide in the slightest. Hold ups, drive by shootings, intergang warfare....it's all over the place now. And that stuff gets headlines. The fact that the real rate of violent crime is dropping gets missed.

The fact that most guns used to commit these crimes are unknown to the authorities i.e. not registered and that the people who commit these crimes are unlikely to follow government rules about safe storage, firearms safety training and not shooting people is lost on the antis and the politicians who support the regulations.

People have always lived in cities ever since man became "civilized". New York and Chicago were big cities 100 years ago. But as Gnomon points out, hunting and the shooting sports were quite commonly practiced by city dwellers then, even the wealthy elites. Maybe especially the wealthy elites. That is who was buying Parker A-1 Specials, Lefever Optimus', and the high grade British doubles that made it across the ocean.

But something has changed dramatically since I was a young boy. There has been a concerted effort to increase the separation or divide between those who engage in shooting and blood sports and those who do not. It is more than mere coincidence that the media elites and the lowly media reporters who have been hard at work pushing an anti-gun, anti-hunting agenda are almost all liberal left wing thinkers and practitioners. It is not, by and large, the right wing that has demonized even the mention of guns in our schools, or advanced the legislation to control or eliminate guns, or published and broadcast the steady drumbeat message that guns are bad. Almost all activities that show guns in a positive light are ignored or ridiculed. Very popular shows like The American Sportsman are long gone. Coverage of shooting events in the Olympics has been gradually decreased to nothing.

Gnomon laments the fact that the divide between the right and left, conservatives and liberals, is wider than ever... and so do I. But he chooses to excuse the behavior of the extreme left wing liberals who have co-opted the heart and soul of the Democrat Party. The party my Dad called the party of the working man has become the party of the non-working man. The votes of poorly educated and dumbed down masses are being bought with so-called entitlements. The ACLU is filing suits right now to prohibit states from drug testing welfare recipients. It is the liberal left that has been so hard at work to demonize guns and remove them from our culture. I am not a single issue voter, but preserving the Second Amendment is more important to me than many other issues.

You cannot claim to be pro-gun and support gun rights and then go into a voting booth and pull the lever for a man with a 100% anti-gun voting record. Taking a few city dwelling friends to the range and introducing them to shooting is not going to offset the damage that one powerful anti-gun politician can and will do.