When a Fatal Grizzly Mauling Goes Viral | Hacker News Reader

When a Fatal Grizzly Mauling Goes Viral

outsideonline.com

19 pointsjoegahona22 comments

Honestly, when you're dealing with the scale of the Internet, ie. billions of people, do the disgusting comments of a few dozen, hundreds or even thousands of people matter? It's not something you encounter in the "real" world, but it feels like we need to change our scales logarthimically when talking about Internet comments.

Probably a million people read about that article and 99% didn't think those horrible thoughts, but maybe less than 1% did and commented on social media. Just by sheer numbers, you're going to get a lot of terrible comments, it seems like this is the "new normal" and growing thicker skin is something we all need to deal with, unfortunately. To a regular person, a few dozen shitty comments will be hard to take from real people, but when considering the scale of the Internet, it's probably not significant and it's something we all need to learn, unfortunately.

Even in person you'll probably get a considerable number of awful comments, there are simply a large amount of insensitive people out there. It doesn't help that they feel emboldened by anonymity.

Insensitivity, I think, can be a coping mechanism for some. I was a teenager during 9/11. I remember having a good cry about it and then spending the rest of the day looking at and sharing wildly inappropriate photos (that we now call memes).

I agree. Perhaps evidenced by yourself, the people who we call insensitive or trolls today, could be the pillars of society tomorrow. We should be very careful when trying to answer the question "what do we do with these people?".

Is the comment of "she should have had a gun" really that insensitive? I say this as someone who grew up in bear country and knew people that had bear spray readily accessible when outdoors. I'm sure some of them would've carried handguns if Canadian gun laws were less restrictive and not dictated by urbanite easterners out of fear.

I don't know in which bear country you grew up, but good luck killing a grizzly attacking you by surprise with most guns. Not that this is fundamentally impossible (her husband did it, after all) but not with a handgun. These guys are nothing like the black bears you may see in other parts of America...

Grew up in Alberta, but spent a lot of time as a kid in the Kootenays in British Columbia, so no stranger to grizzlies. I've seen a few while hiking as well, very scary.

I think the idea that a handgun cannot penetrate a Grizzly's skull is a myth anyways. Plenty of accounts of people shooting attacking grizzlies dead with a large calibre handgun. Bear-spray can work but what if it doesn't or what if there's wind working against you?

A large caliber handgun isn't easy to control and aim for most people. Imagine having an infant with you (even in a snugi/backpack). I'm a large man, and unless I had frequently trained with a 44 Mag or larger, I think the bear would win easily.

Sure, it is not _literally_ impossible to kill a grizzly with a handgun. But, to quote yourself:

> Handgun can work, but what if it doesn't?

The point is not that it should be forbidden to bring guns when you hike in grizzly territory, but that by experience, many people who do are also the least knowledgeable about bears (and I say it that way to stay polite). Who cares if I let meat leftovers next to the campsite, I have a gun! Who cares if I go down a trail rangers explicitly told me not to because of the bear presence, I have a gun!

Killing the bear isn't the objective, stopping it from killing you is,the same goes for legitimate self-defense against humans. And it turns out that's frequently possible, even with human self-defense handgun calibers. You might discourage the bear with a wound, pain is a great motivator and works half the time with humans, but for bears disrupting a shoulder for example works well. Here's one study of 63 cases with 95% success rate: https://www.ammoland.com/2019/03/pistols-or-handguns-used-to...

And in serious bear country, serious people carry serious long guns, a 12 gauge shotgun with slugs, or a centerfire rifle with a significant payload. And it's easier to shoot those well under stress.

Yes, I can also google "can you kill grizzly bears with a handgun" and look at the first result. And I can also google "pepper spray bear success", which tells me that:

> "Red pepper spray stopped bears’ undesirable behavior 92% of the time when used on brown bears, 90% for black bears, and 100% for polar bears. > Of all persons carrying sprays, 98% were uninjured by bears in close-range encounters.

Which then raises the question: which deterrent is the most successful, gun or pepper spray?

> And in serious bear country, serious people carry serious long guns, a 12 gauge shotgun with slugs, or a centerfire rifle with a significant payload. And it's easier to shoot those well under stress.

Source? Sure, I guess it's "safer", but also way less practical in many situations. 99% of the time, just making noise and let the bear do its stuff without bothering him suffice to avoid any issue.

She was ambushed from grizzly bear hiding six feet from her path. If that happens, you are dead, no matter what.

Way inside Tueller Drill range (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill), if the grizzly disabled her in the first blow her situation was indeed impossible. If not, and that's reported by some survivors, depending on what was hit and how a handgun was holstered, a handgun is a lot more ergonomic than a spray can, for example in pointing, it would have given her a better chance to strike a counter blow.

She had a gun, it's in the article.

Article doesn't say that, just that

>The investigators’ reconstruction of the attack made it clear: even if, somehow, Valérie had had a loaded gun in her hand when the bear made his move, she wouldn’t have had a chance

Really bad luck and a tragedy either way.

"In the aftermath, I found myself surprised and disturbed by the amount of attention the attack received. I felt intensely protective of my grieving friends and my shocked, horrified community—I wanted to shield them from the intrusive phone calls, the strangers creeping into their social-media profiles, the awful, cruel comments appended to every news story."

...so I wrote an article in Outside magazine about the other bad people writing articles about it.

You seem to think that this is ironic, but I fail to see how you came to that conclusion.

It seems like the other comments in here are proving her point. Hacker News, too, proves to be an insensitive place.

> Later, after he had used his Garmin InReach to contact the nearest detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)

Did this read to anyone else like an extremely odd product placement advertisement? Why not just say 'satellite phone'?

For what it’s worth InReach is not a satellite phone. There are no voice calls on it. It’s more like a satellite texting device, you can send and receive text messages via satellite (and also use this to share your location). It’s much cheaper than a satellite phone both for the device and the subscription itself.

It's a publication for outdoor enthusiasts (and armchair enthusiasts too) who care about such details (equipment and its capabilities). Not all satellite products work in all regions, and readers might be interested in what worked in this case, as well as what someone might choose Also, it's not a sat phone, it's a sat messenger (no voice, only text messages), as well as emergency beacon (though the article does not go into enough detail about whether he used the emergency functionality or just the texting).

That makes sense, thanks.

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