There have been what I thought were Hutterites, but which are maybe Amish, at the last two gun shows here. . . .

they've been selling farm supplies and and backed goods.

So what's that have to do with anything?

Maybe not much.  But they're linked in my mind due to something that's slowly bothering me.

And that is, I don't think we're capable of handling the technology we're creating.

Now, this isn't quite in the "the robots will kill us" vein that some have recently proposed, although I do find artificial intelligence to be disturbing.  This is more in the vein of, contrary to our common cheery belief about ourselves, we're a lazy species that will do nothing if given the option, and that ends up killing us.

Indeed, this is one of the aggravating things about the now popular Universal Basic Income ideas floating around here and there, and now being given a test run in Finland.  The idea is that we give everyone a UBI, funded by taxing others, and that this means that people won't have to work those grunt jobs that they otherwise do, and will spend their time doing wonderful things including advancing themselves so that people who would have spent their lives picking rags in a parking lot will become nuclear physicists.

No, they won't. They'll spend their time, in short order, watching Lisa Vanderpump's latest moronic spoutings on television, even if they think they should get up and turn it off.

There's plenty of proof this world wide, including in our own backyards.  Canada has granted what amounts to a UBI to First Nations groups for quite some time and now is facing a complete destruction of some of the cultures of those groups.  Freed from the need to hunt and fish in their native lands, they do nothing.  To the extent any culture remains, it mostly remains in the hands of women, to a diminished degree, as women always end up bearing the role of raising children no matter what.  A recent study of one such group determined that the loss of knowledge in just a few short years was so extensive that it wouldn't even be possible to urge a resumption of prior native behaviors as the group had completely lost the knowledge of how to hunt and fish in their traditional way.  A complete, and benevolent, cultural destruction.

Here in the US the Los Angeles Times recently asked the question to its readers hypothetically as to one one out of five Californians lives below the poverty line.   Noting that one out of three American welfare receipients lives in California, and that California has generous welfare provisions, the Times concluded: 

The generous spending, then, has not only failed to decrease poverty; it actually seems to have made it worse.

Likewise, if you happen to practice law at all, you'll see the actual manifestation of studies in the US that demonstrate that people who acquire assistance usually go from being horrified by it and wanting off to acclimating themselves to it quite rapidly.  Men and women who first go on assistance and who desperately want off, in a period of months, go to adjusting their lives so as to be stay on it.

I'll note here that I'm not making a moral judgment in regards to this, or at least not in the fashion that it might at first seem.  I wouldn't regard myself as a exception to this rule.  If I suddenly had sufficient assets that I didn't have to work, I wouldn't.  I'd like to think that if I did that I'd spend my time tending my garden, going fishing, and going hunting, but people being who they are, for all I know, I'd spend it watching Hogan's Heroes reruns on television.  There's an instinctual element to this.  

Of course, having worked pretty hard my whole life, and being pretty acclimated to it now, maybe I'd have the opposite problem by this point and be one of those people who find they can't retire.  A couple of fellows that I knew fairly well who retired from very different jobs, but who had always worked their whole lives, ended up going back to work simply because of that. They were so acclimated to it that they couldn't find themselves at peace not working.  Of course, as I have livestock, I'll never really retire anyway.

Anyhow, all of this is why I think that people like the Amish were and are on to something, but I don't think of it in the same fashion that they do.  They eschew technology that the feel makes people proud, and its a human's duty to be humble before God.  I'm not denying that it is a duty to be humble before God, and I think the example of human behavior following World War Two, as every European based society in the Northern Hemisphere became wealthy, is plenty evidence of how badly societies and cultures will act once they figure that they are petty gods,, but that's not quite might point. 

I'm concerned that our technological evolution is so pointless, and by that I mean with out a defined point or direction, that the goal is simply to make things more and more efficient to the point where our ultimate fate is to get fat on the sofa.

What's this have to do with the gun show?

Well, this past week I read that the Wyoming Game and Fish Department was debating some technological advances in hunting and fishing equipment.  They should indeed do that.

One of the advances they were considering concerned advances in crossbows.

I'll confess that I know nothing about crossbows and I'm not a bow hunter, which perhaps makes me a hypocrite in this category as I'm comfortable, obviously, with firearms and a truly "go back" purist would urge the use of bows. But that shows part of the problem here.

Bows came in, here anyway, in the 1970s.  They were part of a movement started by the late Fred Bear who espoused bows as he believed that an increase in the human population would mean one day that everyone would have to go back to bows. Frankly, that strikes me as an example of retroactive justification of your own likes, but whatever.  Anyhow bow hunting came in during that time.  I  think almost all of the younger hunters I know, and quite a few of them my age (and not very many older than me) have taken it up in order to "extent the season."

 One heck of a bow hunter.

One thing that has happened as that's gone on is that bow technology has dramatically improved and that was, frankly, a good thing.  Not too many people could be comfortably lethal, I think, with an old style long bow or an old style recurve bow. Some could, but not many.  The modern compound bows are pretty darned lethal.

But crossbows?

Before we deal with them, let's discuss black powder rifles.

 Bill Williams, 19th Century Mountain Man.

Wyoming doesn't have any designated "primitive" rifle seasons, but a lot of states do.  And I thought they were pretty neat. The problem is, however, that technology and engineering combined to defeat the rules that were originally introduced, and that's the problem that I have with crossbows as well.  Originally the thought was that there should be special seasons, like there are for bowmen, in which the hunter went out with a rifle that resembled one of the old muzzle loading rifles that prevailed before 1865.  They do indeed require skill to use, and you normally, with most of them, get but a single shot.

But, engineers have gone out and made what are basically bolt action rifles that take a preformed charge. These aren't primitive at all, they're just weird rifles designed to circumvent the rules. They're everywhere, however, and I see them all the time as a 4H Shooting Sports leader.  I don't like them.

And that's my concern with crossbows.

Crossbows were always a way to get more effective bow, but they're not a hunting weapon.  They were a weapon of war as they could shove a bolt (arrow) through armor.  But sure enough, as they have a stock, and as they can be made relatively  high tech, engineers have gone out and designed hunting variants.  Most states have banned them for that purpose, but Wyoming has not.

I think it should.  Bow hunting is supposed to be a sport of close range skill.  If you don't have the skill, don't insist on going on during bow season. For that matter, for states with special black powder seasons, I'd limit them to historic black powder type rifles as well.

Which takes me on to the most recent technological developments on modern rifles.

In our super rich high tech society we now see developments coming on which completely defeat any human skill in hunting, or at least shooting.  At that point, a person has lot connection with what they're doing.  And for that matter, I think they should be banned. Scopes that lock in and control the firing, which basically  have been designed but which are currently highly imperfect, probably have a place in war, but hunting is the opposite of war.  Most people most places support the concept of going into the field to gather your own game, but most don't want it to be automatic.

But automation is what we're striving for in everything. We're seeking to replace the farmer with an automatic tractor, for example. 

And we take humans out of the equation, we render ourselves completely pointless and will render our lives worthless.  We'll do nothing but eat and breed.

A smart species would ponder this a bit before getting there.  And then not get there.