“I took away all funding for the arts. Don’t worry, I have a plan. You can now shoot bears. There, everyone is happy.”
Huh, Florida has bears, I didn’t even think that bears lived that far south.
There’s a bunch of black bears in NW Florida. During the hell years I lived there 911 would get calls about them in yards and the advice was to leave them alone unless they are hurting someone. Animal control wouldn’t come out if there wasn’t a threat. They were usually just meandering between forest patches. And it was illegal to shoot them in most circumstances; especially since most of this was in subdivisions.
This would effectively allow cowboys to start blasting in your neighborhoods. Probably leaving rotting corpses of young black bears on the corner or in the streets.
Had one cruise in my dog door when a friend was house sitting. So I learned a lot about black bears after that.
“imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury”
You could always shoot them in that case. In any case, what problem are they trying to solve here?
And as to the, “shoot first ask questions later”, you could already do that. If I wanted to hunt or kill a black bear, I’d simply say it was attacking me. And who would say different?
Ahhh, but if you read the article, this is different. This redefines it to “if you PERCEIVE there to be a threat of death or injury” - meaning that any suburban cowboy can just blast the bear wandering through their backyard and not hurting anyone because “well I figured it would hurt my kids if it came towards the house”. Kinda like how Wyoming relaxed hunting laws to allow farmers to kill pretty much whatever wolves they came across.
