Pavlo’s Reviews > A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town > Status Update

As we talk, it becomes clear that something other than fear is also motivating her thoughts of human-on-bear violence. In the spirit of making lemonade from lemons, Beretta has given thought to making a bearskin rug from the bears cavorting outside her door.

Like, serious thought.

I’m unclear on whether owning three guns makes one feel thrice as safe as one gun, or if gun ownership is, like potato chips and birthdays, subject to diminishing returns.

I’ll call her Beretta, because she gives me the by now standard Friendly Advice that if I ever break into her house, I could be shot, blah blah blah.

The curse words are bleeped from the video, an absurd bit of propriety after the grisly violence that has just unfolded

They victim-blame, they intimidate witnesses, and they kill a hibernating mother bear with her cubs???

What seemed clear was this: in a town that refused to allow the government to protect it from bears, vigilantism seemed the only option. Just as the libertarians wanted, it was every man, woman, and bear for themselves.

If this book has a drawback, it is the author's readiness to make gratuitous puns. Normally, I don't mind, but I've just come upon an instance of the author riffing on somebody's name and trivializing colonial oppression, all purely for the sake of making a couple of silly puns; it doesn't even speak to his point, one way or another. I feel like an editor (or a friend) should have tried to stop him there

[the cash-starved Dept.'s] budget-friendly stance on bear conflicts: it’s not him, it’s you.

That’s the primary message underpinning Fish and Game’s ongoing public education campaign: “Something’s Bruin in New Hampshire—Learn to Live with Bears,” which, since 1996, has tried to “enhance public tolerance toward bears” and is based on the assumption that a lot of people are afraid of bears for no good reason.