Should blind hunters be allowed to use laser sights?

gerr, I hate it when I make a good point and nobody responds =/
 
yes, it most certainly does. we seriously need population controls.

p.s. congrats on becoming a mod =]
 
heliocentric, most people who hunt do so because they keep in touch with nature, and were food really comes from, they take part in the harvest and don't delegate the slaughter of their sustenance to others, people seem to forget that to survive you have to kill, be it Animals or Plants, life lives on life, and the most nutritious and natural food for man is wild game, it doesn't have the chemicals, drugs, or antibiotic's in it that are used by the food industry on their factory farms.
 
Fascist.
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what are you talking about? the earth can only sustain so many people. we can improve technology for crop yield, but that only goes so far. eventually we will have mass starvation (more than we already do)

Dismal Theory of Economics: (Garrett Hardin)
"The dismal theory states that, if the only check on the growth of population is starvation and misery, then no matter how favorable the environment or how advanced the technology, the population will grow until it is miserable and starves."
 
cato said:
overpopulation is not, intrinsically, subjective. if one plant or animal is disproportionately numbered, it will cause the ecological system to change. moreover, that change is usually considered bad because it means the destruction of food webs that take hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of years to rebuild (if ever).
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Species do kill off other species and draw other animals close to extinction, but this isnt over-population this is evolution and the natural process of diversification.
What you view as the near ulimtate death of a micro eco-system in the eyes of evolution is a blink of an eye in which new life forms have already emerged to replace what came before. We simply do not have the inherent comprehension of the time-scales involved in the evolutionary process to make these kinds of judgements.
I see what youre saying, and where youre comming from, but i see the end result of atempting to place 'x' animal on a level playing field so they dont kill too many of animal 'y' as ludicrus in the long run.
What if animal 'y' then over-takes animals 'x' (or a smaller group of life forms) in numbers and almost drives it/them into extinction?
Do you take out the shotgun again, and start 'leveling the playing field'.
We could quite litterally abandon our own pursuits as a species and spend the rest of our time on this planet monitoring inter-species dynamics and culling as we go along. Try as we might though, the playing field will NEVER be level, you will always be playing catchup.



I don't have to give value to the animals/plants. like I said above, the entire ecosystem can rest on a single species, why destroy food webs unnecessarily when you can preserve them by keeping a single animal in check?
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But you are placing value on animals/plants purely by making that statement, youre playing a numbers game in which the sentience of the creature you percieve as being destructive does not have the same value as the potential other life forms that could flourish if some of these creatures are killed.
Very very dangerous game to start playing.

overpopulation is based on maintaining an ecosystem.
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Which is based in our entirely subjective criteria of what we think makes a good eco system. As i see it the biggest threat to eco-system currently are human beings, however ive yet to hear any calls from ecologists to cull or prehaps for governments to limit the amount of children a woman can bare.
With this in mind alone i would call their proffesional and objective judgement into question.
Animals will have to ultimately bend to our version of a harmonious ecosystem which is favourable to us first and everything else after, whatever gets culled in the process can be assured it was all for the 'greater good' though.

p.s. your argument is essentially that value is subjective, and that subjective values are without meaning. welcome to the world of ethical nihilism.
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Ive been a nihilist for a good few years now actually lol (intellectually not morally though), and theres nothing wrong with subjective value judgement as i see it when the end result is simply non-destructive action e.g vegetarianism/veganism.
But when an act of destruction is called for under some kind of pretext of a 'greater good' then alarm bells generally start to go off in my head.
 
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But you are placing value on animals/plants purely by making that statement, youre playing a numbers game in which the sentience of the creature you percieve as being destructive does not have the same value as the potential other life forms that could flourish if some of these creatures are killed.
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I place value, but the value is on a sustainable ecosystems that helps humans. I agree that evolution would simply fill the niches with with new animals/plants, and that is really, from the viewpoint that has nothing riding on it, equally as valuable. however, I am not just a spectator, things that disrupt the ecosystem can have economic, medical, and social implications for me. thus, a healthy (beneficial to humans) ecosystem is valued.

As i see it the biggest threat to eco-system currently are human beings, however ive yet to hear any calls from ecologists to cull or prehaps for governments to limit the amount of children a woman can bare.
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I agree. however, the downside to democracy is that unpopular things do not get done, even if they are obviously the best action.
 
cato said:
I place value, but the value is on a sustainable ecosystems that helps humans. I agree that evolution would simply fill the niches with with new animals/plants, and that is really, from the viewpoint that has nothing riding on it, equally as valuable. however, I am not just a spectator, things that disrupt the ecosystem can have economic, medical, and social implications for me. thus, a healthy (beneficial to humans) ecosystem is valued.
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So essentially you agree with my original position in that case -
that over-population is at root a subjective quantity that is only relative to humans.
 
I gotta question. How many blind hunters are there? How many hours were spent by the government making sure that a couple of people would be able to hunt. There was nothing going on in Texas more important than some blind guy who wanted to hunt?

And how come everybody can't use laser sights? Wouldn't you want to make sure that whoever is shooting is doing a GOOD job of shooting? Kill and NOT wound I think would be the preference and a laser sight would certainly help all hunters, not just the blind ones.
 
heliocentric said:
As i see it the biggest threat to eco-system currently are human beings, however ive yet to hear any calls from ecologists to cull or prehaps for governments to limit the amount of children a woman can bare.
W
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What about China? They recognized this very problem and attempted to do something about it. Was it a good idea?

Initially, China's post-1949 leaders were ideologically disposed to view a large population as an asset. But the liabilities of a large, rapidly growing population soon became apparent. For one year, starting in August 1956, vigorous propaganda support was given to the Ministry of Public Health's mass birth control efforts. These efforts, however, had little impact on fertility. After the interval of the Great Leap Forward, Chinese leaders again saw rapid population growth as an obstacle to development, and their interest in birth control revived. In the early 1960s, propaganda, somewhat more muted than during the first campaign, emphasized the virtues of late marriage. Birth control offices were set up in the central government and some provinciallevel governments in 1964. The second campaign was particularly successful in the cities, where the birth rate was cut in half during the 1963-66 period. The chaos of the Cultural Revolution brought the program to a halt, however.

In 1972 and 1973 the party mobilized its resources for a nationwide birth control campaign administered by a group in the State Council. Committees to oversee birth control activities were established at all administrative levels and in various collective enterprises. This extensive and seemingly effective network covered both the rural and the urban population. In urban areas public security headquarters included population control sections. In rural areas the country's "barefoot doctors" distributed information and contraceptives to people's commun members. By 1973 Mao Zedong was personally identified with the family planning movement, signifying a greater leadership commitment to controlled population growth than ever before. Yet until several years after Mao's death in 1976, the leadership was reluctant to put forth directly the rationale that population control was necessary for economic growth and improved living standards.

Population growth targets were set for both administrative units and individual families. In the mid-1970s the maximum recommended family size was two children in cities and three or four in the country. Since 1979 the government has advocated a onechild limit for both rural and urban areas and has generally set a maximum of two children in special circumstances. As of 1986 the policy for minority nationalities was two children per couple, three in special circumstances, and no limit for ethnic groups with very small populations. The overall goal of the one-child policy was to keep the total population within 1.2 billion through the year 2000, on the premise that the Four Modernizations program would be of little value if population growth was not brought under control.

The one-child policy was a highly ambitious population control program. Like previous programs of the 1960s and 1970s, the onechild policy employed a combination of propaganda, social pressure, and in some cases coercion. The one-child policy was unique, however, in that it linked reproduction with economic cost or benefit.
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Full text can be found at China Population Control Programs
 
So essentially you agree with my original position in that case -
that over-population is at root a subjective quantity that is only relative to humans.
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but by that token, ever governmental decision is subjective. so you are right that it is subjective, but that does not make it any less valid than any other human decision.
 
Syzygys said:
Well, ask yourself first: what can a BLIND person DO with a laser sight???
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There's a huge difference between totally blind (lights out) and legally blind (visual acuity of 20/200 or less in the better eye with the best correction possible.

Considering most hunting shots are taken around 300 feet away... In order to even see the game as a blob, a legally blind person would have to get within a hundred feet of it.
 
why not.
Quadriplegics get gun mounted wheelchairs that fire when they blow in a tube.
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