Free Republic

“The ammunition problem isn’t new. It’s been a market factor for well over a year and is rooted in the extraordinarily high number of firearms that were sold over the past 18 months,” the trade lobby group for the firearms industry added. “Firearm sales skyrocketed starting in March 2020 and set an all-time high record that year, topping out at 21 million background checks for the sale of a gun. NSSF surveys revealed that 40 percent of those sales were for first-time gun buyers, an injection of over 8.4 million new owners. That pace hasn’t slowed, and through August of...

Ollie, the female bobcat that escaped from the Smithsonian National Zoo yesterday, is presumed to be in the neighborhoods of Woodley Park or Cleveland Park near the zoo according to zoo officials.

With the public hearing in Soldotna last night, the public comment period on the proposal to close the Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 Brown Bear hunting season on the Kenai Peninsula comes to an end. In a release yesterday, the Governor’s office said, “Federal land managers have again proposed limiting Alaskans’ access to a state resource, the proposed closure is not justified by either resource protection concerns or federal policy. I strongly urge the Service to reconsider this action and allow state-authorized hunting to continue on the refuge.” ... The decision to temporarily close the Brown Bear season on the...

No doubt, the coyote has a bad reputation in some quarters. First, there's that unfortunate resemblance to a wolf. Second, there's that unsavory habit of dining on neighborhood cats and small dogs. The state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife is considering lengthening the hunting season on coyotes and foxes, already the longest for any game animals. And the agency wants to add coyotes to the list of "nuisance animals" that animal control workers are allowed to remove when necessary. The proposal seeks to extend the coyote and fox hunting season so that it would run from the Saturday after Columbus...

Facing the loss of fellow moderates in the Nov. 7 elections, Republican centrists in the House and Senate are faulting Congressional and party leaders for pursuing a strategy dominated by conservative themes... ...Democrats have also made a concerted effort against vulnerable Republican moderates, which Senator Susan Collins, another Republican of Maine, said was not much of a reward for those willing to try to work with the opposition party. “There is no one who has voted more often with the Democrats than Linc Chafee,” Ms. Collins said. “Yet that didn’t stop them from going after him with everything they had....

A black bear camped out under the porch of a home where four children live - and near where 20 kids wait for the school bus... Residents...had suspected for several days that a bear was in their midst after they saw their trash cans tampered with. But it wasn't until two children happened upon the bear on Sunday that its exact whereabouts became clear. Pedro Sainvil owns the home where the 600- to 700-pound male bear seems to have settled in for hibernation. On Sunday, Sainvil sent his two children, ages 8 and 9, outside to play in the snow....

Hunting season brings concerns for gun safety in the hands of persons with Alzheimer's disease. While it may seem for some that hunting and handling guns has been a lifelong skill, the complex mental skills required by the safe handling of guns are usually lost early in the process of dementia. Studies into the behavior of those with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias indicate that threatening and unsafe behavior caused by impaired judgment has been found to occur in 30 to 50 percent of persons with AD. The presence of guns could contribute to serious consequences of life threatening injury...

Published: August 2, 2005 The phoenix had nothing on the ivory-billed woodpecker. It is hard to keep track of how many times this near-mythic bird, the largest American woodpecker and a poignant symbol of extinction and disappearing forests, has been lost and then found. Now it is found again. Even the most skeptical ornithologists now agree. They say that newly presented evidence shows that at least two of the birds are living in Arkansas.

See this link for some C130 gunship scurrying rat ops. <http://www.kingstonco.com/images/ac130_gunshipMed.wmv>

Very few people like the idea of shooting Bambi's mother. But there may be no better way to slow the rapid expansion of deer populations that are devastating ecosystems in many areas of the country. At least 20 million white-tailed deer are ranging the nation at the moment, a huge jump from only 500,000 in 1900, according to a recent report by Andrew C. Revkin in The Times. They plunder farm crops and alter the ecology of forests by eating the low-lying vegetation and destroying the seedlings needed for new growth. In the process, they displace many smaller animals...