Actually, I HAVE thought about it.

Aldo Leopold wrote a pertinent essay, Thinking like a Mountain (http://www.eco-action.org/dt/thinking.html) wherein he discusses the natural order that uses predators to protect the whole.

In the essay, Leopold wrote,

"Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn."

Since many of the natural predators have succumbed to human population pressure and the encroachment of urbanization, hunting is required to protect the environment from deer, coyotes, and wild pigs.

The same is true of the need to trim the human population. Again Leopold words are pertinent.

"We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run."

The desire to make people too safe by repealing the Second Amendment and taking the guns is asking for all kinds of disaster.

Hello bront,

It’s called animal husbandry. I earned that merit badge over fity years ago.

By the way, the only way we’ll lose our gun rights, is if we don’t take steps to limit the carnage of our children.

excon