"Don Foreman" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 17 Jan 2008 05:22:04 -0800, Larry Jaques
wrote:

On Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:45:39 -0600, with neither quill nor qualm, Don
Foreman quickly quoth:

On Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:48:41 -0500, strabo
wrote:

Dom wrote:
Point taken Dan, but I was referring to handguns. Surely a handgun
would be innefective against a brown bear? There are plenty of
farmers in Australia that carry firearms in thier vehicles, but they
are shotguns and rifles. How many farmers do you know that would use
a handgun to kull wild animals? Hand guns are most effective at
killing humans at close range aren't they?

Handguns are handier than long guns in some situations that do not
involve killing humans. If a water mocassin (very aggressive poisonous
snake) drops out of a tree into your boat while fishing a river in the
southern US, a rifle would be quite unwieldy so a handgun is a much
better choice. The risk of shooting a hole in the boat is strongly
preferable to being fanged by a cottonmouth because the bitten will
expire long before the boat sinks.

I grew up in Arkansas, where the Air Police used shotguns to kill the
cottonmouths at the perimeter of the LRAFB lake. I never heard of a
cottonmouth rattler or water moccasin in a tree. Have you seen them
displaying this behavior, Don?

I didn't personally witness it, but I was warned about it by local
guys on a river in South Carolina. They did carry handguns in their
boats. Most were aluminum johnboats; patching a bullethole would be
easy to do on those. A shotgun would make a bunch of holes or one
very large hole, not as easy to patch.

Besides the snakes, the skeeters were murder on that swampy river. I
decided to skip the river and go to a nearby lake.

We use 20-ga or smaller and #9 shot in Jersey. Except for the twin-engined
Jersey skeeters, of course, which are harder to bring down.

--
Ed Huntress