FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED OCT. 24, 1997
Last week's "National Geographic Special" featured the comeback of the mountain lion in the West. With hunting now banned in most locales, and the biological pressure on young males to seek out new territories, the cats' population resurgence is naturally pushing them into more and more direct contact with humans.
A California woman described how helpless she felt when she raced to her porch one night, only to see her pet dog held by the spine, completely off the ground, by a huge cat who proceeded to saunter off with its prey.
One park ranger described the final moments of terror of a middle-aged bird watcher eaten by a large cat last year in a California state park. Another ranger showed school children the correct response when confronted by a lion: stand tall, wave your arms, do not -- DO NOT -- run away.
The final asthmatic moral? Since we no longer aim to exterminate the lion, we must learn to share our space with him.
Not exactly. I love cats, and have no desire to see the mountain lion exterminated. But the correct response on the part of a child who sees he or she is being stalked by a cat three times the child's weight is not to wave and shout, any more than a homeowner should look on helplessly as the family dog is carried away.
The correct response is to aim carefully, and fire.
The bird-watcher was not "taken" by that cat in an ineluctable act of nature. She was murdered in absentia by state officials who threatened her with arrest if she was caught carrying a gun on their precious nature trail, even for defensive use.
In a related matter, talk radio guy Neal Boortz in Atlanta reported Oct. 7 on the threat the BATF may decide to enforce the congressional 1000-foot "gun free school zone" around home schools, as well.
(Media Bypass magazine promises an investigative report on this nonsense in its November edition, based on a letter from ATF Reichsfuhrer John Magaw to Sen. Dan Coats. Check out the magazine's web site at http://www.4bypass.com.)
Boortz then pointed out that most news media did not report the full story of how the young man who recently used a rifle on his estranged girlfriend and several others in the high school in Pearl, Miss. was actually captured.
"When the school principal heard the gunfire he ran to his car and got his personal pistol." He ordered the shooter to drop the gun, and then held him until the police arrived. "Do you realize that this principal was in violation of federal law for even having that gun in his car?"
What if the massacres in Dunblane and Tasmania -- pretexts for the civilian disarmament of entire nations -- had been as quickly cut short by a principal with a gun?
Finally, Boortz moved on to the national parks, where "It is also illegal to carry firearms. ... At the Ozark Scenic Riverway in Carter County, Missouri, the National Park Service is really making some serious cash on this one. There happens to be 200 feet of Park Service land on County Road Z and the gravel road that connects the Z and F highways. According to published reports, NPS rangers are stopping motorists on this 200 feet of highway and searching their cars for guns. If they find one it is confiscated. The owner has to pay $100 to get it back. The take so far? About $10,000."
Until time and space allow a more thorough discussion, I'll just report two worthy books have crossed my desk.
James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, authors of "The Great Reckoning," now bring us "The Sovereign Individual," in which the authors points out how the underlying myths of human culture tend to go out of date every 500 years. A family that invested on the assumption the Roman Empire would make a comeback after 450 A.D. would have been out of luck, just as clinging faithfully to the underlying doctrines of chivalry and the teachings of the medieval church would not have gotten you far during the Renaissance.
Likewise, the authors predict the information age -- and the resultant ability of cyber-producers to relocate themselves and their assets out from under regimes with confiscatory taxes -- will spell the end of the voracious, top-heavy nation-state as we've known it; $25 from Simon & Schuster.
On a very different plane is "Sperm Wars: The Evolutionary Logic of Love and Lust," by Dr. Robin Baker, lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester.
One of the London Sunday Times' "picks of the year," Dr. Baker's highly readable volume explains the genetic and reproductive logic behind human mating behaviors which have previously been shrouded in a fog of rationalization and denial. It contains more revelations per page than anything of the sort that's come my way since "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind;" "Sperm Wars" runs $14 in trade paper from Basic Books.
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.
-- Samuel Adams