I recently noted that Wisconsin went an entire deer season without a single person getting killed. They had more than 600,000 hunters.
By contrast, Italy has seen 35 people killed in four months of hunting — and another 74 have been injured:
Italy’s anti-hunting league, the LAC, said all but one were hunters killed accidentally by their shooting companions.
But the 35th victim was a mushroom collector shot dead near Arezzo in Tuscany. Of the injured, 13 were also non-hunters, mostly people out for a walk in the woods or cycling down a country lane.
Cosa succede?
The annual bloodletting is a result of the unusual freedom allowed to shooting parties under Italian law. They can go on to private property and fire anywhere not within 50m of a road or 150m of a house.
So, Italian hunters have the same rights their aristocratic forebears had? Wild. This doesn’t make them popular:
A survey published by Eurispes, a research institute, found that that less than 18% of Italians regarded shooting as an acceptable pastime.
Over at Marginal Revolution, a commenter makes the not-so-surprising point that hunting accidents make a wonderful cover for not-so-accidental killings.