In still another incident, Barber said that a group of feral hogs came dangerously close to his daughter one evening.
“Hogs are both dangerous and sometimes aggressive…I was not far away. I wish I had been armed,” Barber said. “By the way, the feral hogs actually are the reason why I own the AR-15. To reduce that population, we hunt at night. We have a thermal night vision scope designed to work with an AR-15. We bought the rifle to use the scope.”
“So, it’s really rare in my life and that of my circle of acquaintances to need to use a firearm against a person. It’s maybe more common than some people realize to need one as a tool out on land (four times in a couple of weeks!),” Barber added.
To Barber’s mind, much of the divide over gun regulations can be attributed to a lack of mutual understanding between rural residents and urban residents of America.
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“I try to put myself into the other guy’s shoes and consider a more urban perspective when these topics come up. There are some policy suggestions (red-flag laws, for example) that seem reasonable to me, even if I think them unlikely to solve any significant risk in my life,” Barber said. “I just wish some urban people would reciprocate a little more often and take into account the ways that rural life is just different from their daily experiences and needs. Having a gun isn’t unreasonable out here.”
“This rural/urban divide affects a lot more than gun ownership. And the chasm between the two is sometimes profound,” Barber continued. “Some people flee a rural area with a dream of living in the big city. Other people flee the big city with a dream of living in the country. Those are two different worldviews at odds with one another.”
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“There’s a lot going on there. More understanding would help,” Barber concluded.
