A 12-year-old big-game hunter who regularly snags huge wild
beats alongside her father is learning that, while the Internet generally
frowns on cyber-bullying, it has no trouble berating children who legally use
guns for recreation.
Aryanna Gourdin and her dad recently returned from a sojourn to
South Africa where the
pair legally bagged some major hunting prizes: a zebra and giraffe. Aryanna
posed with her gun and her dead giraffe and put the picture up on
Facebook—where she attracted 78,000 comments, most of them unhappy with her
choice of extracurricular activity.
Gourdin and her dad say they aren’t ashamed of their prize.
Speaking to Good Morning America, her dad
defended their father-daughter bonding—”We’re proud to be hunters and we’ll
never apologize for being a hunter”—and said they were doing the game preserve
a favor, humanely killing an older animal that was terrorizing the rest of the
herd.
But while the concept of big-game hunting—a sport of the rich
and famous, who can afford to pay huge fees to hunt trophy game in
controlled areas—is itself controversial, the response to Gourdin’s post hasn’t
been just about the dead giraffe.
Commenters have made the attacks personal, calling
Gourdin a “killer,” “sick” and an “animal hater.” Some have even left death
threats, telling the pair they should meet the same fate as the animals.
But while Twitter and Facebook have been quick to set up
“trust and safety councils” and “advisory boards” designed to curb bullying on
their platforms, the abuse on Gourdin’s page seems to continue unabated.
Are hunters and shooters the only group of people online that
it’s still acceptable to bully? Dana Loesch, a gun rights advocate and
bestselling author, receives hundreds of hateful messages for her stance on the
Second Amendment per day. And Ginny Thrasher, the 19-year-old
who won a gold medal in an Olympic shooting event, was roundly lambasted
online for the crime of being an American who knows her way around an air
rifle.
In the latter case, celebrities and social justice
warriors who would normally be incredibly vocal on the subject of social media
bullying went straight for Thrasher’s gut in an Olympics of their
own: winning gold in virtue signaling over America’s “obsession” with
weapons.
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