The Untold Victims of Gun Violence

Hunted Haunt the Hunter
Sue Coe

The recent Parkland, Florida school shooting has raised the specter of gun violence once again. And once again, politicians and pundits alike employ hunting rhetoric to absolve themselves and others of their own contribution to violence.

Almost every discussion following a mass shooting pointedly incorporates what I call the "hunting clause," whereby the purposeful targeting of nonhuman animals is deemed an "appropriate" use of guns in contrast to the inappropriate use of guns to purposefully target human animals. This self-gratifying distinction by which nonhumans are "hunted" whereas nonhumans are "killed" or "murdered" is deeply speciesist and immoral. What's worse is that these same people, who seek to justify their gun ownership for the purpose of slaughtering other animals, brag about teaching their children to do the same.

"Like Texas church shooter Devin Kelley, Nikolas Cruz also had a history of hurting animals. For Kelley it was beating a dog. For Cruz it was a string of reported cruelty that included shooting squirrels and chickens with a pellet gun, trying to get a dog to attack a piglet, jamming sticks into rabbit holes and killing toads. His social media reportedly included photos of dead animals," reported Jessica Scott-Reid in the New York Daily News.

Akin to hunters of humans, hunters of nonhumans also get a thrill from murdering. In a 1996 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer detailing a canned hunt, Rex Perysian, a hunter, was anxious to begin. "I wanna peg one of these babies," he said. The boar Perysian set his sights on writhed and cried out with each shot. After four minutes of hell, she laid down and died. "I was pumpin’, man," Perysian said. After wiping blood from the boar's nose, he lifted her head by the ears for the cameras, and then dropped her head "and bellowed into the woods, boasting that the kill had sexually aroused him." Later, as ranch workers dragged away the corpses, Perysian sang a Miller beer jingle and summed up his enjoyment of hunting for the reporter. ‘‘It's just adrenaline, it’s great," he said. I'm sure Cruz and Kelley experienced similar adrenaline rushes at they aimed at students and churchgoers respectively.

Edward Stack, Dick's Sporting Goods chief executive, who was praised for his decision to remove all assault-style guns from his stores after the Parkland shooting, explained why his company will restrict some gun sales. "We don't want to be part of a mass shooting," he said. But Stack doesn't seem to mind being part of some mass shootings.

"Each year in the U.S., hunters kill more than 125 million nonhuman animals, excluding untold millions killed 'illegally' or left fatally wounded. To preserve their 'sport,' hunters verbally camouflage suffering and death," wrote Joan Dunayer in Animal Equality: Language and Liberation. . . . "To avoid seeing themselves as murderers, hunters apply separate vocabularies to violence against humans and violence against nonhumans. Hunters' guns never should be called 'weapons' but 'firearms,' one hunter exhorts. As expressed by another, a shotgun is a 'weapon capable of savage carnage' when handled in a way that endangers humans but a 'delightful tool' when fired at a nonhuman."

One hunter saw her companion shoot a doe through the neck. "After waiting an hour, the hunters began to follow her trail. Pools of blood marked places where she had collapsed before stumbling on. 'At last we found her. She was dying. She was on her knees and hocks [ankles]. Her ears . . . were sagging. Her head was down. Her nose was in her blood . . . Somehow the doe lurched up. Stumbling, bounding, crashing blindly into the brush,' she disappeared. The hunters never found her. . . ." One hunter "recalls a young buck shot in the spine. Bleating loudly, the buck dragged himself through the snow by his forelegs. One of his hind legs dangled by a tendon. . . ." Another hunter was seen "cutting off the hindquarters [back legs] of a wounded doe while she watched." This is the gratuitous savagery hunters, gun owners, and Second Amendment fanatics defend.

"Civilization is far more dangerous than nature," wrote David Cantor in "Beyond Humanism, Toward a New Animalism" in Circles of Compassion: Connecting Issues of Justice. "Humans . . . demonized certain animals as being inherently unworthy of life. Thus, speciesism became Homo complexus' first harmful invidious distinction, initiating a long series in what would become a violent and oppressive history.

Our lust for blood is ubiquitous. As we are all animals, the leap from nonhuman to human—from one life to another—is a small one. Yet who dare tear away the hobbyist and hunter from his fun . . . from murder and suicide or his macabre collection of weapons and bodies? Depriving others of their lives is a poor rationalization for gun ownership. And who are the mentally ill? A society that encourages the murder of nonhumans for entertainment, food, and sport is indicative of a widespread cultural illness—propped up by greed, patriarchy, and machismo—that thrives on bloodshed and destruction.

In Animal Oppression & Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict, David A. Nibert noted that for most of human existence, humans lived in peaceful, communal, egalitarian societies with nonhumans. An armed professional warrior or military class arose from domesecration and agricultural society—the exploitation of nonhumans for their flesh and labor and, hence, the wish to keep these nonhumans and other property from raiders. Likewise, the status of men and their brutality increased among those who commandeered manufactured weapons to stalk, capture, or kill other animals.

The failure of the human species to take the lives of all other animals into consideration and to ensure their rights to lead fulfilling lives is incredibly tragic and self-destructive since our own grief, hardship, and demise is directly linked to their abuse, desecration, and deaths.

". . . the weaponed class prevailed, developing into the tyrant class our species still struggles to free itself from today," Cantor explained in Animal Abuse: It's Why We Suffer. . . . "The more status the weaponed class acquired, the more human societies came to depend on animal abuse; the more humans depended on animal abuse, the more they suffered from it themselves."

"A mistake many people make is to think caring about nonhuman animals means not caring about human beings," continued Cantor. "The reality is that nearly all human misery is rooted in animal abuse . . . the vast scope of animal abuse starting hundreds of thousands of years ago when humans started killing off their natural predators and killing nonhuman animals for food, clothing, weapons, tools, and other purposes."

We diminish and deaden our true nature, each other, and our union with the natural world when we condone our reckless, anti-life policies. We do the same when we insist someone is "just" a squirrel, a deer, a cow, a bear, a chicken, an "animal." We accept and tolerate the hunting and killing of other beings—as long as we ourselves are not the hunted—and incorrectly assume the moral universe will look the other way.

Until we accept that it is just as wrong to take the life of a nonhuman as it is to take the life of a human—that the core of our anguish and suffering is inextricably tied to the misery and torment we rain down on every living being—we will keep getting the world we deserve.

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