Don't bring a bear to a gun fight...

Here's how I spent my workday yesterday:

This was the final stage of training for combined bear awareness and firearms safety. I'm still conflicted in many ways about guns, and the course was clearly taught from the perspective of "guns are a wonderful, fun and effective tool(!)," but it was interesting and potentially useful (and I'll even have to admit to the fun part, too).

We also used a can of bear spray as a demonstration, which was probably the most useful part of the day since that's going to be my preferred deterrent out in the wilderness. Definitely not a very long range for the spray, but even though I was standing back from the person with the spray and they were spraying with the wind there was a distinct burn in the eyes and throat that lasted about 5 minutes. I sure wouldn't want to be on the business end of that stuff.

One other note that I thought was kind of funny: throughout the class the various firearms were referred to as "deterrents." Um... does it look like I was trying to deter the bear in those videos?

Update: Here's a coworker's video of another exercise, where we started out with less ammunition loaded than we would need for the exercise and had to "port load" additional rounds. This means we had to load directly into the chamber through the ejection port for spent rounds, rather than loading shells into the magazine and then cycling them into the chamber.