French hunters react angrily to drinking ban plan to reduce accidental deaths | Hacker News Reader

French hunters react angrily to drinking ban plan to reduce accidental deaths

theguardian.com

14 pointssandebert8 comments

Jesus Christ, French hunters. If you're worried about being delegitimised in the public eye, maybe stop having your supporters say stupid things...

> In 2018, a 24-year-old hunter killed Marc Sutton, 34, a Welsh restaurateur living in Haute-Savoie who was out on his mountain bike. The hunter was sentenced to four years in prison, with three of them suspended. Afterwards, a pro-hunt Macron-supporting MP suggested banning offroad cycling during the hunting season.

I regret I have but only one face to cover with a palm at this.

In NZ, mixing alcohol and a firearm is a great way to lose your firearm licence (if caught).

Perhaps we can ban alcohol and all intoxicants broadly. Reduce deaths by overdose, driving intoxicated, bar brawls, and the like?

Otherwise, who cares. It’s headline grabber of statistical non-issue importance. All in all, I’m more likely to be dead by a motorist on a bicycle commute than I am a bullet on a hunting trip, and I do both.

Pretty much all intoxicants bar alcohol have been banned until very recently. Alcohol is too inherent to Western cultures, so got a pass. And where weed is legalised, it's still illegal to drive (and presumably operate firearms) while intoxicated.

So, your suggestion has already happened?

Alcohol affected drivers and hunters increase your chances of dying while cycling and hunting, so you thinking this is a non-issue is directly contrary to your own best interests, which is an interesting stance to take.

Let me put it this way - forbidding drunk driving and drunk firearms usage reduces the risk of harm to others. So where's the downside?

Aside from "sitting in a mai-mai (hide) waiting for ducks is cold and boring, so let's get pissed", in which case, get a different hobby.

And "statistical non-issue" is easy to say when the excess deaths are faceless.

NZ saw a significant reduction in "oh shit, I shot my mate" hunting accidents when the hunting culture changed to "save the beers for sitting around the campfire after a day in the bush", but it wasn't an overnight change.

Seems like something that is easy to dismiss when you only consider yourself, someone surely able to avoid killing others, while forgetting the idiots that ruin everything for everyone.

Same with things like open container laws where you can’t have open alcohol in your vehicle. Then a drunk driver kills someone close to you and suddenly the idea of every car having a built in breathalyzer sounds like a utopia.

According to the article, only 9% of hunters are drunk.

Not trying to argue about anything in the article, especially as I have absolutely no idea about French hunting culture, but the article doesn't actually say that. It says that, according to a hunting lobby, "91% of breathalyser tests after hunting incidents are negative" (emphasis mine).

Assuming that alcohol increases the risk of accidents, the percentage of hunters who have drunk should be higher in cases where there is an accident than it is generally, so the percentage of hunters who have drunk would be lower in the general case.

That 9% is assuming that the data gathering is perfect, that all people responsible in such an incident are breathalysed (it's not unknown for someone else to claim to be the driver/hunter in alcohol related incidents), and that the alcohol measurement took place soon enough to be useful.

And all that aside, if you can reduce that 9%, then that's less death and suffering, so why not do so?

Yeah, it still sounds large. As I said, I wasn't really commenting on that. I was commenting on the fact that someone seemed to be deducing a number they can't deduce based on the article they said it was from.

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