That is simply not true anymore.
We do not have many fudds, they do not have to be placated. On boards like this we have far more than in the general population.
A five year study trying to make the most of the data could only count 11.5 million people that even bought a hunting license at least once and were counted as hunters for a given year.
I keep a hunting license myself and almost never even try or plan to kill anything finding it unchallenging requiring nothing but patience and a steady hand to line up some crosshairs and adjust for range, and it does not save me money and requires I take a life. I still do it on private land to rodents I don't even need a license for but that is so they don't overrun me, and have no need to do it to deer or elk to bag game that tastes worse than a steak from the store produced from the 10 billion+ farm animals just us in the US kill to feed ourselves each year already.
Yet I am counted as one of those hunters, just as is all the people that took a once a year trip out to the forest with a hunting license or tag even if that was the only time they did it. Which is most of the hunters. Far more sight in their rifle once in the year than actively participate or do much in the outdoors regularly. That means that clearly is not one of the priorities in their life if they spend less than part of one day of the year doing it.
Believe me they track this stuff, because most wildlife money comes from hunters' licenses and tags, and the decline is seriously hurting the money for conservation.
Millenials do not hunt or fish or enjoy the outdoors that much as a generation, and the subsequent generations born since a smart phone and the internet has always existed hunt and fish even less than millenials do. The only reason you even see some in the woods is because our population is much larger, but the percent that take part in real wilderness is drastically less. Most counted as taking part at all in wilderness activity were simply looking at animals around their house, something people wouldn't even have counted traditionally.
'Hunters' might do it once a year on a vacation or when grandpa or dad drags them along, but they don't do it often and prefer other things.
So even when counted officially its not very frequent.
This means respect or concern for the outdoors, nature, and activities done in it are on a decline overall. (A big problem even for city dwellers as wilderness is what protects most watersheds, once you have human development and especially industry near your sources of water your rates of cancer and other issues go way up.)
Sure there is still plenty that enjoy it and I hope to do my part to encourage more to take part in the outdoors and respect it, but even in the smaller percent able to be encouraged to stop playing video games or watching videos online or cable TV during their free time or engaging in social media and go in nature even fewer that have respect for nature view killing parts of it as what they want to do. Of the dying percent of people that still do even enjoy the outdoors more backpack, hike, camp and watch nature more than kill it.
Out where I live getting a tag and hunting costs a lot more per pound of meat than buying some of the best cuts of beef, requires I kill (which then makes me the bad guy if I am with someone else I managed to get to go that feels bad for the animal) then get bloody gutting and cleaning the animal, before packing out something that will rot in a short time. While I can easily backpack for as much time as I have available. Hunting is a hobby, does not save you money if you live where the majority of the population in the United States lives, and the percent of people involved regularly in the outdoors overall is going down.
More people fish than hunt, and more people bird watch than fish. Those are the statistics.
Hunters are a small minority of gun owners in a lot of the nation now. They do not have to be placated at all. The self defense and tactical crowd is several times larger, and they are who is targeted in these bans.
That was an old strategy that was required a couple decades ago.
The new strategy is to divide different segments of the self defense crowd, because hunting is low on the list of priorities of even most 'fudds', and the number of fudds is on the decline. Only 11.5 million people in the entire USA got a hunting license to even have the ability to hunt, and you know even fewer than that actually hunted, and even less hunted more than one day.
A lot more people care about having a gun to shoot other people if needed than to shoot an animal. Plain and simple. Hunters barely factor into the strategy anymore, and do not need to be placated to pass anything.
