Cee Zee... in fairness... those of us that hunt, and use our guns for self defense spend more time punching holes in paper WITH those same guns for that same purpose than we do actually harvesting game or shooting bad guys.
You guys don't know the same hunters I do. I have always been around people that never picked up a gun unless they were going hunting. And most of my guns have never punched a hole in any paper of any kind. I gave a link to a survey for pity's sake. I wasn't being condescending. I was being truthful.
Lets' talk about my brothers. Both have been excellent shots as long as I can remember. They are both older than me. I have never once saw either one shoot a hole in a target. Never. They were avid hunters for 50 years until their bodies couldn't take them out to do the kind of hunting they love, coon hunting. But they both did a lot of squirrel hunting. For one summer in my life they got together once a week to shoot at pignuts or actually they shot at the stems that held them on to the tree in the front yard of the house we grew up in. Other than that I've never seen them do any kind of practice more than shooting one box of ammo with a pistol once every 4 or 5 years. My oldest brother has never owned a pistol though. He told me recently that he had rarely ever shot a pistol.
Yet those guys hunted hard for many, many years. When coon hides were bringing big money they were making big money by bringing in those hides. They must have shot 1000 of them over the course of 10 years or so when the prices were high. But they went even when the prices were down.
So yeah those guys shot at game probably 30-1 over shooting at any sort of a target and they never shoot holes in paper at all.
Now let's talk about the guys we knew in the outdoorsman club. Those guys were all like us. I never shot at more than 4 or 5 targets in my life until about 5 years ago BTW. Now I shoot targets and my brothers make fun of me for doing it. But all those guys in the club were like us. They didn't shoot for the sport of shooting. They shot to hunt.
You guys are from an entirely different culture than I am. I've been around people like this my entire life. The only practice shooting I ever saw was shooting clays to practice for quail hunting. We didn't need to practice on targets. We had varmints to shoot and we shot them when we felt like shooting. Bats were about our favorite targets. We shot them because they can be a deadly nuisance. They carry rabies, they nest in houses and they defend their nests by attacking anyone who gets near the nest. So we kept them away from our house by shooting them.
Just because the people you know are like you and shoot at gun ranges that doesn't mean the vast majority of people do that. A lot of them do but it certainly isn't some huge majority. I linked to a survey by a reputable company on the subject.
One other thing. You talk about people who carry guns for SD shooting more targets than shooting at people. That might be true but I certainly know people who carried a gun for SD for years and never shot it for anything much less for target practice. He would keep a gun for 15 years and never shoot it more than enough to see that it worked. That guy was my dad. I knew others like him too. Like my uncles and just about everyone else in my community at the time.
Not everyone shoots at ranges. I never went to a range until about 4 years ago. Never. But I can shoot very well thank you. We learned by shooting at things we needed to eat.
All I said was that guns were used for other reasons than shooting targets and it's true. I know that for a fact. I'll give one more example here. My mother's brother was a primary provider of food for my mother's family after my grandfather left my grandmother for some rich woman who liked the fact he was a pitcher for the Reds. My grandmother would give my uncle TWO shells and tell him to bring home something to eat. And he did just that. Yes they were poor but they certainly overcame it. Within 10 years my uncle owned a chain of gas stations in Los Angeles. My mother married my father who made $45,000 at his regular job plus what he made building houses and farming. My mother became a nurse. So back in the late 60's early 70's they were bringing in $100,000 a year between the two of them. That was big money then. But my uncle still keeps his guns around because he knows things can go wrong again and he'll need to feed himself.
I know not everyone is like we were. We were genuine hillbillies and proud of it. My mother went to school with Loretta Lynn if that tells you anything. There are millions of us though and the vast majority of them never dreamed of using a gun for entertainment. It was too expensive. Guns were tools and we used them as tools. From my mother stopping a would be rapist to my grandfather standing down a gang of bank robbers with a shotgun we certainly knew what a gun was good for. And at times we did use them as entertainment but by far the biggest use we had for them was to put food on the table or money in our pockets. That's the hillbilly way guys. And there are millions of us.