A blogger in the US added up the deer license sales in just a handful of American states and arrived at a striking conclusion:

In 2010 there were over 600,000 hunters that hunting season in the state of Wisconsin. Put another way, over the season’s several months, Wisconsin’s hunters became the eighth largest army in the world with more people under arms than in Iran, more than in France and Germany combined.

These men and women deployed to the woods of a single American state to hunt with firearms, and no one was killed.

That number pales in comparison to the 750,000 who hunted the woods of Pennsylvania and Michigan’s 700,000 hunters, all of whom have now returned home.

Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and don’t forget the 1,169,667 in Texas, so it literally establishes the fact that the hunters of those five states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

The point?

America will forever be safe from foreign invasion with that kind of home-grown firepower.

Hunting — it’s not just a way to fill the freezer. It’s a matter of national security.

In Australia, individual ‘skill at arms’ was alive and well until the beginning of the eighties and, with the final nail being driven into the coffin lid in 1996, rifle shooting was a sought after and encouraged skill enjoyed on weekends by thousands of patriotic Australians from within and under the Defence Act.

These proud riflemen formed the core of the two all-volunteer lead elements in the WWI and WWII 1st and 2nd AIF, both of which performed magnificently in battle at the beginning of each war.

Where would we find enough skilled marksmen today?