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>People have been saying this for a decade, and I still sit there realising how different a bubble a lot of commenters here live.

Nearly every thread involving cars or traffic also makes this abundantly clear.

No kidding. Not to mention the disdain for things that are nearly essential in rural areas: 4wd trucks and gas/diesel instead of electric vehicles, or the right to carry firearms.

I live in rural PNW. Electric is at LEAST 20 years from being a feasible and reliable solution. ...and I say that as a civil engineer with some specialization in creating EV charge stations. 30-50 might be even be more plausible.

When I'm in the field, small things can turn into life-and-death situations pretty quickly out here when you're an hour and a half drive from cell reception, followed by another hour and a half drive to town with a small hospital/sheriff station, and you're up a dirt road where a tow-truck simply won't come. And the geology is notoriously unstable and slides/washouts/fallen-trees happen constantly.

My clients LIVE in those places, I only visit. They drive big diesel rigs (They often NEED to transport big heavy stuff, and you can store diesel for long time periods in a tank onsite), and a lot of them also have transfer tanks in the back of their truck for extra range. (Because it's needed!) They also almost all carry food/water/shelter/A chainsaw/tools/a gun/etc in their vehicle for a reason. Self-rescue is all you got a lot of the time.

That's my perspective as well and where I have the most visceral reaction.

But, to be fair, there are a lot of folks who will say 'I'd never go without a car' that haven't lived in a place with great public transportation. I used to think that way as well until I spent six months living in a place that had great bike paths and lots of options for local and regional public transportation. I started off with the intent of trying no-car daily living and it was perfectly fine. In six months I rented a car one time for a weekend trip, that was it.

So to me the lesson is to try to have a bit of empathy for the personal experience of the person making bubble points and focus on expanding their perspective rather than debating their position.

This leaks into the misinformation topic as well but there's another thread for that :)

Em. Half of my relatives live in a rural area. Not a single one of them has a 4WD truck (or any trucks at all). Why is it considered a necessity in the United States?

It's a pretty big country too, with shitty roads and pretty low population density.

Trucks or vans with 4x4 drive are pretty common in Mexico, Brazil, the middle east.

You're falling into the same trap that the article and GP's are highlighting: your experience that a FWD vehicle is enough "for me / my relatives" does not apply to this situation.

1) survival in animal / vehicle collusions with bears, deers, and moose

2) delivery of goods, including building material, animal feed, human food, etc

3) lack of even basic road infrastructure maintenance by government or municipality

4) "over prepared is only prepared", you're it, you're on your own

I lived for 20 years in a semi-rural area; you could certainly live for 99% of the time without a large cargo vehicle or 4x4. The other 1% you were chancing your life. Cargo and deliveries were certainly an issue though. Now just slide that ratio towards the middle.

Watch Matt's Offroad Recovery on YouTube, sometimes you need 4WD and ground clearance to get around reliably. Certainly more people own vehicles in that caliber than are necessary, but that's not always the case.

Do they raise cattle / own farms like most of my clients? I don't know how you'd get by without one for that use case.

Where do your clients live to need guns for protection? I presume it's for wildlife? What kind of wildlife poses that kind of threat? I know it's mandatory to carry firearms outside of settlements on Svalbard for polar bear protection, and friends of friends have found out why the hard way. (One literally woke up with his head inside a polar bear's mouth.)

Also, I don't think "licensed hunting firearm for wildlife protection" is quite relevant to "gun rights". You don't need to buy your fifth AR-15 or full auto Uzi at the grocery store to protect yourself against bears.

To answer your question, the firearms are needed for protection from both wildlife and people, but much more so people. It's useful to have a rifle to put down a cow that's been hit by a vehicle and/or broken a leg or something.

However, I live in an area where stumbling upon foreign cartel marijuana grows is relatively common. They are known to aggressively defend them with firearms which are not legal to own in the jurisdiction they're in. It's also not uncommon for a truck full of guys intent on committing armed robbery to roll up onto a client's property.

An AR-15 would be an ideal defensive weapon for that use-case.

I have to admit, I'm not very experienced in armed conflicts with drug cartels, but the idea that engaging their people with your AR-15 would be better than retreating and/or deescalating seems more like a gun fantasy to me than a realistic assessment of such situations.

I have significantly less experience on the topic than Enginerrrd seems to, but I can confirm that:

> the idea that engaging their people with your AR-15 would be better than retreating and/or deescalating seems more like a gun fantasy to me than a realistic assessment

is more a product of your

> not very experienced in armed conflicts with drug cartels

that it is a accurate assessment of how effective/possible retreating and/or deescalating is.

Thanks! I can definitely see the merit of the cartel argument. Also good point about putting down injured animals.

(I still think gun regulation is a good thing, with some background checks to reduce the chances of people with e.g. psychosis getting their hands on assault rifles.)

You're coming into this pretty hot and it seems like you've fast-forwarded a few exchanges into a conversation that hasn't happened. It's going to difficult to exhibit empathy in that circumstance.

I don't understand most of your comment (English is my fourth language). I don't understand "coming into this pretty hot" and "fast-forwarded a few exchanges". I also don't understand the part about empathy. What's empathy got to do with anything? I obviously understand the individual words, but not the idioms behind or what you are trying to convey.

In case any parts of my comment were unclear, I'll try to reiterate or clarify.

First I'm genuinely curious about what kind of wildlife would pose a threat to the point where you need to defend yourself by carrying guns in your car, and where you would risk such an encounter. I try to convey that this is curiosity more than criticism by comparing it to the genuine need on Svalbard.

I then address their claim about "gun rights". My point is that protecting yourself from wildlife isn't about gun rights. No one (as far as I know) is looking to ban a licensed hunting rifle or high-caliber handgun where the owner would need it for protection. My point is that many "gun rights" advocates want to have five AR-15 or a fully automatic Uzi—guns that are highly capable of killing a high number of people and not very effective against bears. In other words, I understand their clients' (legitimate) needs but I don't think it's relevant to the concept of "gun rights".

> I visit my parents most months. They live in rural Ireland. Not like a one off build down a back road miles from civilisation, but a small village of a few hundred people. They absolutely do not have reliable internet, and at this point they've cycled through every available provider.

This is why state run services matter, Because they will 'serve' in areas where private businesses cannot turn up profit and so they have no incentive to serve.

5-6 years ago, In India only the state run telecom - BSNL's service would be available at remote, hill stations. But with 4G it couldn't keep up with private telecom and the company is nearly done for. So now again there's no connectivity in remote areas and mountains as private players don't bother ~~serving~~ doing business there.

This is especially worse with pandemic, many in such areas have lost communication outside world and remote-education is non-existent for children there.

> So I regularly run into cases where I need to prepare ahead of time for no/spotty internet and still get surprises as some app refuses to launch because it decided now is the time it needed to update over a connection that's doing single digit kilobytes per second, or speak to a license server or whatever.

Recently I was on a flight and prepared a book on my iPad the day before. iBooks decided that it was a good idea to “offload it into the cloud”, a book that wasn’t even 24 hours on my device with plenty of space available. Who knows…

Or when an app decides that it's too out of date spontaneously, and I literally get stuck on an error screen when I just launch the app that used to work up until today... "just install the latest update to enjoy this app"

Yeah, that's a dick move when I'm not on wifi or don't have data access at all on a long hiking trip.

> iBooks decided that it was a good idea to “offload it into the cloud”, a book that wasn’t even 24 hours on my device with plenty of space available

I had the same problem with Google Books on my Galaxy devices. There's a feature that will let you pin the book to be available offline. But you have to do that for every book.

It really takes away the usefulness of the devices.

We were promised rural broadband! 2 billion of rural broadband.