OF CULTURE AND UNLIKELY ROLE MODELS

Among friends and those who know me well, I have garnered something of a reputation as a grammar and terminology Nazi.

This is not to say I claim to be a great grammarian, I'm not, but I have been known to develop a curious twitch while attempting to decipher text messages and Twitter posts.

Anyone curious to witness a full-blown seizure need only refer to the likes of the Greens and Gun Control Australia (GCA) as “gun control advocates”.

There are some abuses of terminology far too grievous to overlook and this ranks high among them, not least for the damage it does to the shooters’ cause.

The term “gun control” suggests a level of responsible moderation completely alien to both the Greens and GCA, both of which are prohibitionist agencies.

In fact there are few genuine gun control advocates outside the Australian shooting fraternity itself.

Most Australian shooters advocate some level of rational and enforceable gun control, earning them the title “extremist gun nuts”, while those who advocate a guns free society are accorded the title “responsible moderates”.

Failure to challenge and correct this deceptive terminology at every opportunity is largely responsible for our current situation, in which realities of moderation and extremism have been surreptitiously reversed.

Few rank and file members of the citizenry believe the Greens and GCA are striving to ban firearms altogether, yet if one whizzes-off to their websites in search of policy it becomes clear this is the formal objective of both agencies.

As a result, when shooters oppose the extremes of Greens/GCA social engineering endeavour, we appear intractable and unwilling to compromise when in fact our position is seldom so petulant.

Of course the second most frequently applied slur is the claim gun owners are adherents of the ominous “guns culture” - oooh boogy! boogy! boogy!

This claim is deployed in order to diminish the validity of both our opinions and our humanity itself. However, I suspect that in reality it may be a well of as yet untapped potential for the shooters’ cause.

There currently exists abundant evidence in our opponents’ own words (quotes, media releases, interviews etc) proving unequivocally that they have identified and acknowledge a “guns culture” in Australia.

Further, they are eager to define it as a culture embraced by anyone who wants to own a gun and is happy for others to own guns too.

They have even gone so far as to tell anyone willing to listen, that every aspect of the guns culture is bad, intolerable, even evil and must not, under any circumstances, be permitted to flourish unopposed.

The culture must be comprehensively stamped out!

This opposition extends to the promulgation of negative and often humiliating stereotypes and insulting epithets, such as weekend cowboys, rednecks, gun nuts and psychopaths etc., ad infinitum.

When such activity is aimed at other cultures – gay culture for instance – and if it is contrived to incite extreme loathing, fear, hatred or marginalisation, it is referred to as bigotry.  

If it is likely to incite violence it may be deemed hate speech.

In either case the activity is an offence subject public condemnation and penalty.

Now while there may be evidence to suggest that homosexuality is not chosen or learned, but determined by the gods, chemistry or random chance, what we call “gay culture” is not.  

It is embraced and public criticism of its legitimacy as a culture will land you in all sorts of hot water.

All we generally acknowledge as gay culture is adopted by choice and inclination, just as the shooters’ culture, from the clothes and camouflage pattern one feels most comfortable in and the make-up one wears, to the guns one is drawn to and the terminology one uses, is all adopted by choice and inclination.

Who knows from whence this inclination flows. Perhaps it’s a drive inherited from one’s parents, or forebears. 

Perhaps it’s the primeval hunters’ instinct resurfacing in some, or perhaps it is even gender related.

To my knowledge there is absolutely no evidence that it is purely learned or environmental and therefore a superficial and correctable affectation.

In fact the most notable difference between the two cultures may be that while homosexuals have identified and embraced gay culture proudly and of their own volition, the guns culture identifier was thrust upon shooters, albeit by some of gay cultures’ most ardent advocates and defenders.

Perhaps it is time we stopped permitting the likes of the Greens to shame us into rejecting our guns culture and instead begin to embrace it and demand respect and equality in line with the principle of tolerance of cultural diversity.

Of course the Greens and GCA would claim the use of ‘culture’ in a negative context is well established and accepted practice and they would be correct, to a point.

Society refers to evils such as the drugs culture, the culture of violence, rape culture, the culture of abuse and even the culture of discrimination and all these 'cultures' have at least one thing in common.

They are all illegal activities under the law and it is considered acceptable to deride, denounce, insult and roundly condemn that which is illegal.

The “guns culture” so liberally applied by the likes of the Greens and others, like gay culture and even aboriginal culture, is not illegal under the law.

In anthropological terms, ‘culture’ refers to “the sum-total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.”  [Oxford dictionary]

Interestingly, the Australian Government fact-sheet on Multiculturalism states:

“Australia’s approach to multicultural policy embraces our shared values and cultural traditions and recognises that Australia’s multicultural character gives us a competitive edge in an increasingly globalised world.

"The approach articulates the rights and responsibilities that are fundamental to living in Australia and supports the rights of all to celebrate, practice and maintain their cultural traditions within the law and free from discrimination.”

The right to celebrate, practice and maintain culture and traditions within the law and free from discrimination – I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t mind gettin' me a piece of that action!

Perhaps it’s time we took a leaf out of the bestselling book of gay pride, embracing some of the epithets intended to cause offence, demanding respect and investigating legal remedies when that respect is denied.

Anyway, I'll get outaya way now...

©gmallard2016 all rights reserved 

Follow the Hunters' Stand on Twitter @Hunters_Stand

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A NOTE FROM A TRANSRACIAL BOWHUNTER

So here’s Federal Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, declaring that the Australian Government does not support bowhunting because it’s cruel.

Greg 'Hunt', now there's a little gem for the irony fans.

Well good for you, Greg. You are a man of principle! Unless the hunters in question happen to be Australian Aborigines, in which case, well, not so much.

The fact is, Greg, I could care less about your position on bowhunting. I’m in the admirable position of being able to opportunistically identify with the culture of my maternal grandfather, who was a Wiradjuri man from out Mudgee way.

As a consequence, I can assert my traditional native hunting rights. This includes the capacity to take pretty-much any animal I see fit to harvest; feral and native species alike, even with one of those nasty bows you disapprove of.

I can chase a roo on my motorbike or in my 4X4, and I can shoot him with a large calibre rifle, or, I can hunt him on foot and lob a spear at the general vicinity of his vital organs. 

If I don’t kill him outright, that’s all very regrettable, but what’s one to do.

It’s culture and culture, while often imprecise, is essential...to blackfullas!

I can hunt goanna, pursuing him underground or inside a hollow, and upon reefing him out by the tail, thus dislocating major portions of his spine as he struggles uncooperatively against my efforts, I can smack his head against a handy tree...maybe a couple of times. 

Of course I can also do the same to a joey, should I come cross one in the pouch of that kangaroo I mentioned above.

That’s culture!

I can use a speedboat to chase down a green turtle and with him safely on his back in the bottom of the boat, the sun roasting his belly, I can head for shore in my own good time, to smash his head-in with a handy rock in the traditional manner.

That’s culture too!

I can also spear or shoot a dugong of course, from the bow of my outboard powered tinny, then tow him back to shore for the coup de grace, followed by a bit of traditional seaside butchery.

Isn’t culture wonderful!

Even better, you won’t see much about any of this stuff in the press or on the tele. 

The Aussie media has no interest in the persecution of blackfullas. It’s not PC and anyway, the media, like the rest of touchy-feely, oh-so enlightened, citycentric white Australia, loves its blackfullas to bits, just the way we are.

It's all about respect, Greg, respect!

The poor old abbo; he's the apex predator, Greg, at the top of his county’s food-chain and without doubt the land’s most charismatic species of native fauna.

And Greg, you have to admit, while for 50,000 years blackfullas have daubed every conceivable geological feature on the landscape with proud images of their hunting exploits, they've very rarely posted the images on Facebook or Twitter.

You have to give them that!

A blackfulla can’t help what he is or what he does. It’s in his blood and it’s important government does everything it possibly can to protect that, for the survival of the species, not to mention the tourist industry.

Sure there are shops in all but the most remote outback locations, but blackfulla hunting isn’t just about food, Greg. It’s about instinct and there ain’t no stopping instinct!

Yes, whitefullas have seen the error of their ways! Never again will they engage in the sort of unconscionable white supremacist social engineering born of cultural ignorance they were guilty of in the bad ol' days, no way!

Thank God, I can be a blackfulla!

Were I a whitefulla a whole bunch of other whitefullas - those of the morally enlightened, habitually outraged, culturally superior kind - would accuse me of cruelty if I killed a deer with my longbow, just for his meat, hide, sinew and antler...as my father did, and his father before him, and untold eons of men before them.

Many would even abuse me openly via social media, calling me a killer, a murder of innocent animals, a psychopath and so on. 

They’d make derogatory comments about the size of my penis, they'd tell me I wasn't a real man and they’d tell me what a disappoint I was to the human race, reminding me, “some of us have evolved you know!”

Government ministers would emphatically inform ABC journalists that what I do is cruel, proudly stating that the Australian Govt opposes both my culture and my tools of choice in the strongest possible terms.

In fact, as a whitefulla, my ‘tools’ would magically morph into “WEAPONS for cruelly taking innocent lives for sport” and their efficiency would be called into question in ways that just don't apply when I’m wearing my Aboriginal flag t-shirt.

Now I don’t claim to fully understand flag t-shirt magic, or black/yellow/red braided headband magic either, if I’m perfectly honest, but Greg, I do understand its awesome power enough to know this much...

Wearing the t-shirt or the headband while I kill an animal with archaic equipment, is all the difference between being a “sicko pervert who should be forced to watch his children skinned alive by a psychopath so he knows what it’s like for an animal to die”, and being a credit to my race for bravely striving against white ignorance and prejudice to preserve my precarious culture and traditions.

What I don’t understand at all, Greg, is how come whitefullas believe they’ve progressed – nay, ‘evolved’ – beyond all that cultural and racial prejudice of the bad ol' days, when all they’ve really done is changed the colour of the folks whose culture they aim to obliterate from the planet, because they neither understand nor approve of it?

Anyway, that’s enough from me. I have to pop out and drop a match in some Spinifex to burn-off a couple of thousand acres.

Now you may think it’s cruel to inflict third degree burns and an agonising death, more or less at random, on thousands of unsuspecting rodents, birds, small marsupials and reptiles, just for the sake maintaining the ecological balance, but really, Greg, they don’t mind at all. 

My lot have been doing it to 'em for eons!

No, what’s cruel, Greg, is whitefullas targeting individual feral cats with precision instruments, in an effort to prevent them eating billions of rare and endangered native rodents, marsupials, birds, amphibians and reptiles annually, all at no cost to the taxpayer – that’s what YOU call cruel?

Finally, Greg, I want to wish you the very best or luck, in all sincerity, as you search for they plethora of species-specific viruses which result in instantaneous death, that you're going to need to battle the feral menace your people introduced to my land. 

Until then, I guess you'll just have to make do with a combination of those painless professional bullets and that whitfullas' panacea, 1080, or the "Ebola of the pest control industry" as it's referred to by the vast majority of civilised nations, which, unlike Australia, banned its use long ago.

Anyway, I'll get outaya way now...

©gmallard2016 all rights reserved 

Follow the Hunters' Stand on Twitter @Hunters_Stand

If you'd like to share this post the link to cut & paste is http://thehunterstand.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/a-note-from-transracial-bowhunter.html

For those wishing to leave comments either anonymously or under their own names (go-orn, I dares ya!), please select the 'Name/URL' option from the drop down menu beneath the comments section at the bottom of this page. You do not need to enter a URL.

If you would like to receive notifications when new posts are uploaded to the Hunters' Stand, send your name and email address to thehunterstand@gmail.com This service will not include notification of new comments. All information provided will be treated with the utmost confidentiality and discretion.