Bears and the unchambered carry debate

[Double Naught Spy]

NO reason to 'carry' a Glock unchambered, if if it isn't on your person. It doesn't just 'go off', even if dropped. PLUS, in the 'wild', why not carry? Lotsa of really comfy holsters..

In one of the hunting forums in which I participate, whenever there is a shooting where a hunter gets injured (shoots self, shoots another hunter) unintentionally, there are a variety of hunters who come out of the woodwork proclaiming that there is no reason to be walking around the woods with a chambered firearm. Apparently, these individuals feel that guns are too dangerous to be carried around with a round chambered, that just too much could go wrong and they are very vehement about it. They don't do it. They don't allow others who hunt with them to do it.

It is really a very different mindset. In short, you don't chamber a round until you have an immediate need to do so.

What is really scary is that Uptain did this with a gun that was there for defensive purposes.

[Don P]

Absolutely and I know for a fact that I will be able to buckle up just before the impact of the crash

[shurshot]

Yeah, once again... I'll stick with a .44 Mag revolver. No safety, nothing to chamber and if God forbid I ever have to press the muzzle up against 800 or so pounds of vicious muscle, fur and teeth, no magazine to inadvertently release and subsequent lose and no slide to become disengaged and jam when I press the muzzle deep into the fur. Just keep pulling the trigger and praying!!!

[Lohman446]

I get the argument for carrying a hunting rifle with an empty chamber. When bird hunting I normally keep the action of the shotgun open (double barrels). So what I might miss a bird? But that Glock was not a hunting weapon. It was there for defensive use and holstered defensive pistols are carried hot. We may, however, be overthinking how much of a difference it would have made. The guide was on an elk carcass and may have been hit before he could react. Maybe the hunter never gets to the gun if it’s not off to the side.

[Rachen]

Yeah, once again... I'll stick with a .44 Mag revolver. No safety, nothing to chamber and if God forbid I ever have to press the muzzle up against 800 or so pounds of vicious muscle, fur and teeth, no magazine to inadvertently release and subsequent lose and no slide to become disengaged and jam when I press the muzzle deep into the fur. Just keep pulling the trigger and praying!!!

Same here, revolver guy I always prefer large calibers when in a situation where I may encounter vicious predators.

If I am going to be in the wilderness, I am also going to carry a fixed blade on my weak arm side (gun stored in shoulder holster). Smith & Wesson boot knife on belt. In the worst case scenario, I still got 4 inches of razor sharp cold steel. Aim for the roof of mouth or base of neck is possible. Thrust and twist. When a bear or similar large predator actually attacks, they are usually in such a state of rage and determination that they cannot be simply frightened off. The best course of action is to inflict as large a wound as possible, bleed them out and hope to make it out with the minimal level of injury.

[bamaranger]

The real issue is not the type of handgun, it's the fact that the gun was not on the victims person.

The handgun could have been a S&W .500, but hanging in a tree, not on his person, gun type does not matter as much as a flawed practice. Creating an argument over type of gun misses the point.

[Double Naught Spy]

If I am going to be in the wilderness, I am also going to carry a fixed blade on my weak arm side (gun stored in shoulder holster). Smith & Wesson boot knife on belt. In the worst case scenario, I still got 4 inches of razor sharp cold steel. Aim for the roof of mouth or base of neck is possible. Thrust and twist. When a bear or similar large predator actually attacks, they are usually in such a state of rage and determination that they cannot be simply frightened off. The best course of action is to inflict as large a wound as possible, bleed them out and hope to make it out with the minimal level of injury.

You know, I have had a lot of anatomy classes and for the life of me, I can't recall a single major blood vessel in the roof of the mouth from which to bleed out a bear or other major predator. Suffice it to say that if you are trying to make a bear bleed out through the roof of the mouth with your 4 inches of razor sharp, cold steel, you are doing it wrong.

And bears are pretty fast with their reflexes as well. This old boy tried to shoot a bear in the neck, but danged if the bear didn't react faster and just swatted the gun out of the guy's hand...

A hunter was mauled by a grizzly bear after the animal swatted his pistol away as he tried to shoot it in the neck.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a7932291.html

The real issue is not the type of handgun, it's the fact that the gun was not on the victims person.

It would seem that the data of known uses of pistols for bear defense would mean that caliber isn't that important. You don't need a massive caliber to do the job, although we all logically probably want more power than less power.

This is a pretty good read. https://www.ammoland.com/2018/02/def...#axzz5Xd2e7DfV

I think the author overlooks one absolute failure of the .45 acp in the multiple guns used section. He seems to downplay the failure of one .357 incident because the human victim may not have hit the bear. In the case of the .45, the gun quit working because the human victim ejected the magazine (had to google the story to find out this detail. https://www.oregonlive.com/outdoors/...cribes_de.html

Many of the defensive uses of pistols are not against fast moving animals, but against stationary animals, sometimes while the victim is being chewed on by the bear. Attacks were stopped with hits to a variety of locations, often multiples of hits, but not always.

The author seems to overlook cases where people attempted and failed to use or be able to use guns, such as the one noted above where the gun was swatted from the hunter's hand.

[briandg]

Absolutely and I know for a fact that I will be able to buckle up just before the impact of the crash
__________________

i have a young (34) guy who i see once in a while. he will not drive, and bikes everywhere. why? traffic scares him. he will bike down a five lane highway, and feel safe as he does so. why does he feel safe? because he can dodge the car. if a car is coming at him, he can jump off of the bike and the car will hit the bike. he'll be just fine, unless he bruises himself when he jumps off.

i've got no reason to pull your leg about this, its true. kid is a few grains short and the primer is in backwards.

no matter how stupid this sounds, all around the world there are people who believe in things that are even more ridiculous, but those ideas seem plausible, and seem credible.

anything that involves dangerous stuff like guns or bears or biking on highways really deserves closer examination.

a guy i was acquainted with fifty years ago would put dry ice in his gas tank before heading out to cruise. cold gas burns better, and carbonated, fizzy gas works better in the carburetor.

[MarkCO]

Cold gas with hot air does get you a tiny but more HP in a carbureted engine.

People have some odd opinions, some backed up by anecdotal stories, old wives tales and in the rare case, data.

For the vast majority of people, making a left hand turn in a busy intersection is still the most dangerous thing they will ever do. But I have yet to see a person in a compact car with a roll-cage, helmet and 5 point harness.

[briandg]

mark- a couple ounces of dry ice in a tank of premium on a missouri summer night probably isn't enough to help. There was another guy who had a similar thought, he packed a canister with dry ice and methanol, and rigged a metal coil heat exchanger through this thing to cool his gas. That I can see giving a tiny boost by denser fuel mix. but still only along the range of mouse power.

The most amusing part of it was the seltzer aspect of it.

If you are like me, we've heard these things all of our lives, and just dismissed them as nonsense without really putting much thought to it. Then, as time passes and we get a deeper understanding, we realize that the very concept requires a special sort of insanity to believe it. It's really depressing when you see a fully grown adult believing some of these things.

All through my school years, people told me that if I dissolved an aspirin in a coke I could get high. Jesus, mark, I had migraines, and I never once got high when I washed aspirin down with coke. But, that was easily explained. I have to mix the two of them together in the glass.

[Ricklin]

We used to call those sort of anecdotes "Old Wives Tales" don't do that, the old wives will be very insulted.
Most of those tales are patently ridiculous, or might have a tiny grain of truth mixed in with a lot of horse hockey.

[Pathfinder45]

This:

The real issue is not the type of handgun, it's the fact that the gun was not on the victims person.

Although I also vote for the large caliber revolver, it too would have been useless if you don't have it handy when you really need it. The whole point of having a holster is to remain armed when you need to primarily do something else that would otherwise require you to disarm in order to do the work. It's about maintaining immediate access even when it's unlikely you'll need it and you have other stuff to do. If you really think you'll need it, you'll stand by with your rifle in hand and do no work at all. Reasoning that the pistol would simply be inconvenient to the task at hand is what led to the fatal mistake. And this in Grizzly country....

[jfruser]

This off-body handgun carry and empty-chamber carry stuff is foreign to me. If you don't trust yourself or your gear with a hot chamber, make some changes, get trained, swap gear, whatever.

I pocket-carry a S&W J-frame with hard cast LSWC when pheasant hunting, for the love of Pete. Not for protection vs birds, but feral dogs and feral humans have been known to cause problems. When in feral hog or black bear country, I OWB-carry (SS pancake, thumb snap) a GM 1911 in .45ACP stoked with hard cast pills. With a round in the chamber, thanks. Condition One for the win.

Never hunted or roamed through grizzly-land, but were I to do so, my SW629 or a shiny, new 10mm 1911 would be strapped to my meat sack.

And I hunt with a hot chamber in the rifle or shotgun when outside camp. Have not yet met a guide that insists on a cold chamber when on the hunt.

[Ricklin]

For me I am not much of a safety fan. The safety is indeed in between your ears.

That said a good safety is necessary on a hunting rifle, and I use it. My issue with a cold chamber is two fold.
Number 1 is speed. I can flip the safety much more quickly than working the bolt.
Number 2 is noise. A good safety makes no noise. In fact my old FN Mauser the safety is not dead silent. I can pack grease in the bolt to prevent the noise it's very slight, the grease will make it quiet enough.

[IdaD]

This story isn't really about unchambered carry, it's about not carrying and having your gun accessible and under control. And there's really no excuse for it with a handgun you can keep on your belt. The single biggest thing about using a rifle in bear country for protection is you need to have it with you and accessible. Do that and you're way better off than you are with any handgun because you've got a lot more power from a more accurate platform. But if you're not disciplined and you leave it leaned up against a tree somewhere this kind of thing can happen, and it's something you need to be deliberate about with a rifle. The advantage of a handgun is that it's a lot easier to keep it with you at all times. The trade-off is comparably puny firepower but it's a lot better than nothing. This guy's screw-up was taking his gun off. And yes, he should have also had a round in the chamber.

FWIW I don't generally leave a round chambered in my handguns when they aren't on body, especially around other people and really especially around my (or other) kids. But when it's on me in my holster, there's a round chambered. If I'm carrying a rifle in the woods, it will also have a round in the chamber.

[Double Naught Spy]

revolvers are good but shotguns are great, This is proof.

This is proof of neither, given that neither had anything to do with the incident.

[briandg]

That's true, it doesn't have anything to do with carrying a semiauto, either. It's about disabling and recklessly abandoning your only defensive weapon under the old oak tree and then putting all of your attention to a task of gutting out a critter, complete with wet and slick hands. Even with the darned thing in a holster on his person he still may have died.

For the ones who are advocating rifles or shotguns, saying that the guide should have been carrying a bear rifle, I can't find any laws that permit it. A hunter is allowed to carry a firearm during bow season, but it is a crime to use it against the game in any way at all. I don't know if a guide can carry a rifle during bow season, even if it's for purely for predator defensive purposes.

[briandg]

It is really a very different mindset. In short, you don't chamber a round until you have an immediate need to do so.

everybody knows that you don't chamber the round until you want to scare the bad guy off, and then you have to work the action a few more times to show the guy that you really, really mean business before you shoot him.

Five rounds in a twelve gauge turned into four on the floor and a single round in the chamber. Assuming that the person hasn't short stroked it and wound up with an empty chamber.

I wonder how much, if any of this mindset is due to the rules of television?

[jfruser]

Originally Posted by briandg

I wonder how much, if any of this mindset is due to the rules of television?

I tell folk that neither hollywierd nor Johnny Cash's lyrics are good examples of responsible gun use or handling.

[Pathfinder45]

Ya know, it's kinda funny how we humans can be: Knowing the right thing to do, but not doing it; or knowing what not to do, but doing it anyway. And then, those of us who happen to hear about another, or, as bystanders witness the mistakes of another, are quite ready to see and judge the error. And, it's well we should judge, not to condemn this person, as he has already paid the price of his error; but so that we might learn something that just might save ourselves from similar consequences. It's easy to judge that the man was a fool; but, maybe we are all capable of being that foolish, and more besides. If we learned a lesson here, can we apply it outside the box? I would never have done what this man did, and yet, maybe I do it all the time, but in a slightly different context. It's actually quite thought-provoking if you think about it for a while, maybe let it marinate overnight and revisit the situation in the morning....

[shafter]

In one of the hunting forums in which I participate, whenever there is a shooting where a hunter gets injured (shoots self, shoots another hunter) unintentionally, there are a variety of hunters who come out of the woodwork proclaiming that there is no reason to be walking around the woods with a chambered firearm. Apparently, these individuals feel that guns are too dangerous to be carried around with a round chambered, that just too much could go wrong and they are very vehement about it. They don't do it. They don't allow others who hunt with them to do it.

It is really a very different mindset. In short, you don't chamber a round until you have an immediate need to do so.

What is really scary is that Uptain did this with a gun that was there for defensive purposes.

There's no reason to need to carry a hunting rifle with an empty chamber while actually hunting. It makes sense to unload if you're lowering it from a treestand ,or trying to navigate some particularly difficult terrain but other than that I don't see the need. Many people hunt in places where the sound of chambering a round is going to spook every animal in the area.

I hunt with weapons that have mechanical safeties that can be manipulated quietly and I use them in conjunction with keeping the barrel pointed in a safe direction and my finger off the trigger. There has to be a failure of all three before something harmful happens.

[briandg]

Myself, I hunt with both bolt actions and a 742 semiauto. I suppose that a million people turkey hunt with pump shotguns.

All of my bolts have actions so loud that they can be heard by a sharply observant whitetail deer for probably 100 yards as it cycles, those high frequwncy tics travel forever. My 742, a semiautomatic, makes as much noise as dropping a box of wrenches. Maybe even 200 yards of open country couldn't muffle that noise if the wind was carrying it.

Now seriously, give me a break, guys, turkey hunting with an empty chamber?

One of the tropes of gun ownership and self defense is that if you should leave an empty chamber in your pump twelve gauge and rack it when you have an intruder in the house. The story goes that no human being can resist the urge to flee when that sound strikes the ear and occipital lobe. A homeowner will find nothing but a puddle and an empty room, and nobody would ever have to fire a shotgun in self defense.

Now seriously, if a shotgun can scare a hardened homebreaker into messing his pants and fleeing like a gazelle, I would guess that racking a shotgun could scare a wild turkey.

I find the idea of 'hunting' with an empty chamber to be ludicrous. Walking to a stand? Okay, that isn't technically hunting, but I guess the deer will be polite and wait for you to get into the stand. If you are out in the fields after quail, I can't imagine that it would be easy to rack a shotgun and then line up to fire.

If someone is engaged in a stalk, the stalk will be ruined.

if a guide took $3,000 from me for a hunt and threw a ridiculous restriction on me without having that clearly and emphatically laid out in his agreement, I would probably stop the hunt right there, go home, and file a suit for an insanely large amount. License fees, transportation, any preparation costs, and an enormous punitive damages cost for screwing me out of a hunt that I may not ever be able to replicate. I don't know how the guy could win it.

Why would I stop the hunt? I don't trust people. telling me to carry empty would probably lead to an argument. telling the guy I won't will probably make him angry. He'll probably lead me on a snipe hunt. I'd be wasting my time and thousands of dollars.

[shafter]

To me, having a quiet safety is a requirement for a hunting rifle and I suspect I'm not the only one here who thinks that way.

[Double Naught Spy]

I wonder how much, if any of this mindset is due to the rules of television?

Mark Uptain was an experienced guide and long time hunter as well as a lifelong resident of Wyoming.

It would seem awfully shortsighted to blame complacency on television. He wasn't a neophyte bubba-wannabe from the big city out to get his first deer. He probably had a better knowledge of bear threats than most folks.

[briandg]

To me, having a quiet safety is a requirement for a hunting rifle and I suspect I'm not the only one here who thinks that way.

I was hunting a ridge down in missouri, in ozark forest, and a handful of does climbed the ridge to cross it. I had been looking down the other side of the ridge when they came up. I heard the sound, and had to quietly turn, and the darned things crept right up to me, about thirty feet, no more. Oh, yes, I thought. Buck might be with them. Took off the safety, the click alerted her, she looked me right in the eyes and I counted her lashes. Zip. The buck didn't bother making an appearance.

I don't think that there could ever be a silent one, you have to have some solid detent to retain it. Friction fitting would be dangerous. Even if you could do it, a silent safety could slip off without alerting you. A small, but obvious liability to the makers.