Apparently, they’re comfortable with these stark realities: that guns outnumber people in the U.S. A sizable minority of Americans (35%) view the protection of gun rights as more important than controlling gun violence. “We’re never going to be able to prevent gun violence,” said one pastor who opposes efforts to change our laws, as if humans can no more control the brutal behavior around us than a bear can control its appetite. Many Americans remain adamant that regular mass killings and daily gun deaths - along with countless life-changing injuries from guns - are the necessary price we pay to protect the right to bear arms. How to answer the fact that guns are the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in our country for the first time in history? Or that accidental shootings by kids occur almost daily? Just sad facts of life. As if ensuring proficiency with lethal weapons - even against our own kind - is as essential to human development as instilling values or building character, and a human attachment to guns as vital and ordained as a bear’s instinct to attack its prey. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” the AR-15-style rifle ad urged. The maker of the assault rifle that killed the children in Uvalde advertised the weapon by posing it with an infant and quoting scripture to suggest that training in its use should be part of every good parent’s obligation to their children. But what struck me as truly tragic in the aftermath of the school shooting was the apparent view among many that guns and the human bloodshed they cause are also part of the natural order of things. There is, of course, no comparison between a hungry bear eating a moose calf and an angry young man gunning down a classroom of children. The image of so many young people facing down the barrel of a gun, with no safe place to turn, tore at a consciousness already raw from bearing witness to the killing of another young, defenseless creature. Less than a week after the calf’s demise, still gripped by a sadness I found hard to shake, the news that 19 children and two teachers had been gunned down at school in Uvalde, Texas, hit me hard. But the wisdom around me didn’t lessen the loss I felt. That’s what bears do.” As a 50-year Alaskan, I know the drill about getting attached to wildlife. “How sad for the little guy.” But to a one, they also relayed some version of, “That’s nature. “How heartbreaking for you,” everyone said. Hearing the story, friends were sympathetic. Within minutes, it dragged the tiny carcass away. Again the mother charged - hundreds of pounds of fury hurtling towards the hulk of solid brawn. Soon the mother appeared and charged the bear full-on, running so close she seemed to brush its fur. In the twilight, perched in bushes near the resting place, a huge grizzly bear was pulling at something in its paws. On the sixth night, we were awakened by commotion outside our bedroom window. What she knew instinctively, we knew through simple research: Many moose calves don’t survive. Like her, we watched and listened, alert to sounds and movements we would usually ignore. Head up, she rotated her ears like antennae to catch the sounds of cars, dogs and people, raising her hackles countless times a day at any hint of threat. ![]() ![]() From her vantage, the mother could face away from our house down an open slope toward the road that crosses below. When she rested, the calf would leap and tear in circles, testing its stride, then collapse in exhaustion. At intervals, she would stand and use her head to nudge the calf to nurse. For hours, the mother moose would lie peacefully, gently nuzzling and licking the calf, and the calf would return the attention, snuggling close. To us, there are few scenes of greater tenderness and vulnerability than the tiny creatures at their mothers’ sides, wobbling on spindly legs.įor six days, the moose pair rested and rose from the same spot on the knoll, until it became a worn bed. In the hills above Anchorage, at the edge of wilderness, we’ve come to almost expect them. It wasn’t the first time a mother moose had chosen the sheltered space between tall spruce to give birth. ![]() More than most Americans, Alaskans have front-row seats to lessons from the natural world.Įarly in May, a baby moose was born on the knoll in front of our house, not 30 feet from our living room. (Loren Holmes / ADN)Īs members of Congress undertake bipartisan efforts to address gun violence in the wake of recent tragedies, they could find inspiration and fortitude in wild scenes that unfold across Alaska this time of year. A moose calf nurses from its mother on Tuesday, on the Anchorage Hillside.
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