Safest Sport? Hunting! (caution: may dispel media myths!)

Status
Not open for further replies.
R

RichardInFlorida

Member
Joined
Feb 19, 2007
Messages
134
Location
Sunny Tampa Bay, Florida!
I just read this: Sports Injuries: Hunting Has Lowest Incidents of Injury

It would seem that the Unified Sportsmen of Florida compiled all of the stats on sports related injuries, and the folks hunting with guns are --by far-- the safest. Now, I always figured that to be true, but this should be good information to carry around with you when you talk to non-gun people.

I figure it is pretty persuasive to show that billiards players (!!!) are far more likely to suffer injury than a hunter!
 
Depends on who you ask. Paintball is also considered one of the safest (safer than bowling, even). I would disagree, however, that hunting is the safest. Fact is, you're frequently climbing over rough, untouched terrain with heavy equipment, and the risk of falling, ankle, and knee injury are very high. Any time you're deliberately climbing that type of terrain with a heavy load, you're increasing your risk of injury dramatically.
 
Hell, if I did anything SAFE... I would have not any fun damn it! :cuss:

Several life's adventures come to mind but I take them to grave with me :D

I will say that no one got killed; hurt yes, but not dead.
 
Just because there's risk associated with an activity doesn't mean that the sport itself isn't safe. Mitigation of that risk, due to the recognition of the hazards involved, can make an activity with risk safer than if the risk was not mitigated.

So, if your criteria is an objective criteria like reported injuries to decide if something is safe or not, the fact that the risks are mitigated just influences the safety of the activity.

My question would be whether there was a severity of injury factor considered?
 
It is interestin

that Jeff Cooper who was probably in the presence of over a million firearm discharges in his life, died peacefully at home.
 
Safety records are based upon results not the risk of the activity. Having an older population hunting plays a huge role as well IMO.
 
Only 239 injuries in hunting? Somebody is blatantly lying or misrepresenting the data. They have made hunting look safer by limiting what categorizes as an accident as being only discharge-based incidents. This is but one type of activity that results in injuries to hunters. It would be like their classification of soccer injuries to be limited to only those injuries associated with actual ball kicks, or ball hits in baseball, rod casts in fishing, etc.

At 239, they are using IHEA data from 2007.
http://6fbd21e64bc817fd097aa54148bd...ents.com/documents/Incidents/HIC2007Mar08.pdf

The 239 injuries in question ONLY pertain to injuries caused as a result of weapon discharges. The inattention to detail here concerns me as does the mixing and matching of concepts.

Note that the 239 incidents in the IHEA data include incidents involving bows (1) and crossbows (1) as well. So the number should be 237 firearms "accidents." Even then, not all of those actually happened to hunters. Some of those incidents were where hunters shot non-hunters such as hikers.

So are weapons discharges the only sort of hunter injuries? Not hardly. In the 2005/2006 hunting season in Georgia, fore example, more than half of Georgia's reported hunting injuries were falls from tree stands (n=28). http://www.treestandinfo.com/accidents_in_tree_stands.htm

This article notes that tree stand injuries are the number one type of hunting injury.
http://orig.clarionledger.com/news/0301/12/sout01.html

Then there is the issue of heart attacks during hunting, commonly a result of issues such as exertion and temperature...
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/10/27/hm.hunter.hazards/index.html

Also not considered are issues such as poison ivy, injuries inflicted by wounded animals, attacks by other animals, slip/trip/fall injuries associated with hiking in and out of hunting areas or while stalking, butchery injuries, hearing loss, frostbite and other exposure-based issues that occur during hunting, drowning, hernias, biohazards such as rabies, tularemia, giardia, and Lyme, weather inflictions, etc.

Generally speaking, hunting is a safe sport, but it is nowhere as safe as is being claimed by the misleading study. Weapons discharges are not the only types of injuries that occur to hunters, but that is exactly the data on which they are basing hunting as being safe or less injurious.
 
Mike the Wolf wrote: "Depends on who you ask. Paintball is also considered one of the safest (safer than bowling, even). I would disagree, however, that hunting is the safest. Fact is, you're frequently climbing over rough, untouched terrain with heavy equipment, and the risk of falling, ankle, and knee injury are very high. Any time you're deliberately climbing that type of terrain with a heavy load, you're increasing your risk of injury dramatically."

Uh, Mike. Did you actually read the report?
 
Then there is the issue of heart attacks during hunting, commonly a result of issues such as exertion and temperature...
Click to expand...

I tend to think that heart attacks are caused by heart disease, drug use or some other cause and not the specific activity that led to the coronary event. The CDC kind of agrees with me.
 
Titan, I would say that you are partially correct, although medical events such as heart attacks that occur during other sporting activities are recorded as sports-related injuries as well. They are chalked up as pre-existing conditions exacerbated by the particular activity. While not a sporting event, heart attacks are a type of injury associated with clear snow, for example. Your point is a good one in general, however.

-------

What I found particularly insteresting is that the NRA only lists the 239 (almost exclusive, if not exclusive) acts of negligence as the only types of injury that occurs during hunting - as if they were the only types of injuries that happened during hunting. By using such a deflated number, they are trying to create their own myth about hunting, contrary to the thread's title.

What is a bit disturbing is how readily people are willing to take the report at face value without realizing they are being duped and it isn't a very clever deception either.

In fact, the 239 incidents noted in the study come from the IHEA and are considered their Class A indicents by the IHEA. These are basically incidents involving the cops at some level. Class B incidents are the non-shooting related hunting accidents such as falls from tree stands and the like. Class C (not applicable here) are non-hunting shooting incidents and Class D are property damage reports (also not applicable here). This is all readily explained here....http://www.ihea.com/news-and-events/incident-reports/index.php
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top