Maybe that's true, but do you know this or are you speculating? I'm asking because I'm from Norway - a country with one of the highest percentages of gun ownership in the world - almost exclusively hunting rifles and shotguns -, yet where most people would be absolutely horrified if anyone tried to push through a "US style" liberalisation of gun laws. We have very strict gun laws, both in terms of licensing, what type of weapons are allowed, and storage.
Maybe hunting is much more tied to a specific sub-culture in the US than it is internationally, I guess.
>Maybe that's true, but do you know this or are you speculating?
I spent a few years covering 2A topics for CBS News.com (this is before I left to found Recent.io). This is true in my experience. As <brudgers> says, you can be interested in shooting sports without being interested in hunting, but I've found that both groups of people tend to be broadly pro-2A.
Note this may not have been true a generation or so ago. But since then, we've seen a ratchet effect where anti-gun politicians have tried to impose more and more restrictions. One effect has been to turn the NRA into the potent political force it is today. This coincided with the rise of the anti-gun left, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who in this clip seems to say she wanted to ban all guns (or all rifles?) but didn't have enough votes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rA6oX6eWWs Barack Obama, or his aide, filled out a questionnaire in 1996 saying he supported a state law banning the "manufacture, sale, and possession of handguns":
http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire1newes...http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire2.html San Francisco tried to ban possession of all handguns: http://mccullagh.org/sf/handgun-ban/ And so on.
This has been done in the name of cracking down on gun crimes. But the same weapon that can drop a 250-lb deer can also drop a 180-lb man, and even casual gun owners have become politically active and aware in a way they were not a generation ago (when politicians on the left were not as anti-gun as they are today). Also some of the recent wave of anti-gun legislation sweeps in weapons used for hunting purposes, which helps to explain this support for 2A rights.
Gun Ownership as an expression of the Second Amendment culture in the US is different from hunting culture as you expect. There's an overlap of course, but there are distinct differences between people who primarily own guns as an end in itself and those who primarily own guns as a means of hunting. The NRA has developed political clout by appealing to both groups of gun owners.
Maybe that's true, but do you know this or are you speculating? I'm asking because I'm from Norway - a country with one of the highest percentages of gun ownership in the world - almost exclusively hunting rifles and shotguns -, yet where most people would be absolutely horrified if anyone tried to push through a "US style" liberalisation of gun laws. We have very strict gun laws, both in terms of licensing, what type of weapons are allowed, and storage.
Maybe hunting is much more tied to a specific sub-culture in the US than it is internationally, I guess.