On Monday, June 18, 2018 at 9:37:40 AM UTC-4, raykeller wrote:
Wyoming: Another Successful Handgun Defense against a Grizzly
Gun Watch ^ | 18 June, 2018 | Dean Weingarten


Another anecdote backed by limp-wristed "data" from Kopypasta Keller!


Posted on 6/18/2018, 4:21:19 AM by marktwain



On May 31, 2018, about two o'clock in the afternoon, 23-year-old Noah Kolis
was guiding three friends from Chicago. They started at his boyhood home
near Cora, Wyoming. His dog, a Chesapeake-Lab mix, was with them. They were
heading to some rock formations. Noah was carrying his 460V Smith & Wesson
revolver. Two other men in the party were carrying bear spray.


The two men with bear spray had fallen 50 yards behind. The dog alerted on
something. Noah thought it was some sort of big animal. Then he saw the
bears, a grizzly sow and cubs, uphill. He yelled at the dog, but it was too
late. The dog came running back. The sow grizzly charged, moving extremely
fast. His friend from Chicago bolted back down the trail. Noah had his
revolver out, as the bear came to a stop, just a dozen feet away. From
jhnewsandguide.com:

"I was just thinking, 'Don't make me do this, don't make me do this,'"
Kolis said.

As he scanned the ground where the grizzly stood on all fours about a
dozen feet away, the sight of the claws spurred the thought "Those will kill
you." His gut told him a second charge could be imminent. Adrenaline
pumping, "my mind was quiet," he said, as he then calmly pulled the trigger
on his Smith & Wesson Model 460V revolver. The bullet struck the stationary
bear in the cheek, and she fell.

Potential harm to himself averted, Kolis started "cursing up a storm," mad
at the situation and himself, as the bloodied bruin rolled down a steep
hillside in the Bridger-Teton National Forest's Boulder Basin. He shot at
least three more times to end the sow's misery, knowing the gravity of what
had just happened.

"With the pull of my finger," he said, "I just killed three bears."
The Wyoming Game and Fish department investigated the shooting. They found
it to be justified self defense. From gillettenewsrecord.com:

"The dog saw the bear, the bear came after the dog, the dog ran back to
the people," he related.

The grizzly charged "head on" toward one man who was legally carrying a
handgun and shot it several times as it ran to 10 feet in front of him.

"It happened really quickly," Lund said.

One hiker carrying bear spray had it ready but couldn't spray the bear
because the other man was in front of him.
The sow had been involved in conflicts with people before. Cora Wyoming is
inside the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE). Grizzly bears in the GYE
have a bad record of being dangerous to humans. In 2017, over five percent
of the grizzly bears in the GYE were either shot and killed in self defense,
or killed by government officials after being shown to be an serious threat
to people and their property. In 2017, that was 35 bears out of a
population of about 690.

The bear was wearing a collar. The collar showed the bear had been trapped
and collared after conflicts in the Upper Green River area. The sow had two
cubs with her. There is a good chance the cubs will not survive through the
winter. Bear cubs have a high mortality rate. They are often killed and
eaten by adult boar grizzlys.

The 460 S&W magnum is one of the most powerful pistol cartridges chambered
in a revolver. This case illustrates how effective it can be at stopping a
grizzly bear. Handguns have stopped bear attacks 97% of the time in the
cases that have been documented. All cases that involved pistols being used
to defend against bears, that could be found, were included.

Horse pucky. This "study" is based on only 37 incidences, which suggests that this "research" was pretty flabby. The study I cite below is based on 269 incidents in Alaska, alone, over almost exactly the same period.



Bear spray might have worked. It can be effective. In the studies most
cited to recommend bear spray, the researchers refuse to release their data.

More horse pucky. The best known study is this one, and it's the one he's citing:

"Efficacy of Bear Deterrent Spray in Alaska"
https://wdfw.wa.gov/hunting/bear_cou...prayAlaska.pdf

....which goes into details about their data, its sources, and supporting citations.


Numerous flaws have been found in the methodology. The primary flaw seems to
be in the selection of what cases to include in the data base. Most of the
cases involving bear spray were with non-aggressive bears.

Horse pucky again! The study he's talking about, which is the one listed above, includes careful distinctions between aggressive and non-aggressive bears, and if you add up the aggressive-bear references (they're mentioned 27 times in the study) they total FAR more, and are analyzed individually, than the few incidences discussed in the article you're quoting.


"Herrero and Higgins (1998) analyzed 66 non-experimental
incidents in which bear spray was used on both wild brown
and black bears and found that in aggressive encounters with
brown bears bear spray ended the bears unwanted behavior
in 94% (15 of 16) of incidents. However, in 6 cases the bear
continued to act aggressively; in 3 of these cases the bear
attacked the person spraying. In 88% (14 of 16) of the cases
the bear(s) eventually left the area after being sprayed."

That's just one example of how Herrero et al. clarified the distinctions between aggressive and non-aggressive bear incidents. Bear spray is not always effective against aggressive brown bears, but, from the figures below, it'a about as effective as a firearm.

In a study of
firearm effectiveness by the same authors, most of the cases involved
aggressive bears.

True, but again, you can isolate percentages from both studies and make comparisons of cases involved aggression. And the numbers come out about the same.

Herrero et al. point out some possible limitations to their data (since 2001, Alaska's privacy laws don't allow reporting directly from state agencies, for example), and it's possible that the number of successful defenses with guns could come out somewhat higher. But of known cases, it comes out like this, from "aggressive" cases:

Defense with pepper spray: 90% success
Defense with a long gun: 76% success
Defense with a hand gun: 84% success

In other words, there isn't much difference.

BTW, in the firearms-defense cases, 61% of the bears were killed.

This is Herrero's other study:

"Efficacy of firearms for bear deterrence in Alaska"

https://ia800402.us.archive.org/30/i...-in-alaska.pdf

- or -

https://tinyurl.com/y9ja6k2h



In this case, the bear had stopped only a dozen feet away. The situation was
extremely dangerous. 23-year-old Noah Kolis my not be a big game hunter. He
said the biggest thing he had killed previously was a rabbit he had hit with
his car. He was calm in the face of a deadly threat. Others have said a
magnum revolver in the hand calmed them enormously. From The Longest
Minute-Terrifying Bear Attack:

As I pulled the revolver out, a sudden calm came over me, and I knew
everything would be fine.
Noah kept his cool and did what he had to do. He protected himself and his
friends.

©2018 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice
and link are included.

Gun Watch



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There's not much to choose, if you take an honest look at the data.

--
Ed Huntress