I go hiking on a regular basis. My neighbor always teases me about getting eaten by a bear. I am not worried about the bears in Southern California. Ran into a bear while backpacking in New Mexico this summer without any problems as well. A new study that shows that “it really isn’t about the kind of gun you carry. It’s about how you carry yourself.”
As for firearms and bears, you need to be prepared because shooting a large fury object with teeth and claws is not like shooting at paper targets. Handguns are slightly more effective than rifles as well. The study had no way of looking at how many times there was not an attack or how some other posturing averted an attack. Just how well firearms performed in an attack. The results, “151 human injured and 172 bear fatalities.” More information is available here.
