It all comes down to individual choices, doesn't it? We make these all the the time in choosing our preparation/survival strategies and tool kits. The threads in this forum I find very helpful in considering and refining my choices and developing strategies.

The strident, emotional level of invective in some of the posts in this thread are less than helpful and are not in line with the typical discourse here. It would help if we would play nicely together.

Since SAR experience has been cited, I can't resist chiming in. I did my first SAR more than fifty years ago and have contributed to hundreds of operations since then, mostly in southern Arizona. During that time, I have seen no operations involving bears (none involving rattlesnakes either, for that matter), a few involving accidental discharge of firearms (not a huge number, but some), but many (more than the cross ties on the railroad or the stars in the skies) involving alcohol, where the blood levels at autopsy indicated the victim was legally drunk. These typically involved a fall from great height sufficient to cause death. By a wide margin, the major cause of fatalities was falling from height (usually more than forty feet); usually the victim had wandered inadvertently into steep terrain and did not have the equipment or experience to deal with the situation.

The common denominator among the victims was inexperience or unfamiliarity with the environment. Oddly enough, during the period during which I was most active, we had more fatalities from drowning and floods than from dehydration and heat. This has changed somewhat in recent years in southern Arizona because of the influx from south of the border. We lost more people from cold weather than from heat, as well.

I own and use firearms - one of my most cherished possessions in my S&W M28, owned since 1964, and used seriously on a few occasions. Mostly I don't carry it because other items are far more likely to be useful, like a good climbing rope or a full canteen, an extra fleece, or a handful of matches. That is my choice and yours may differ; that's fine.

The fact that we are having this discussion is good - we are thinking about the problem. The majority of people getting in trouble in the outdoors do so because they don't even consider that they could get into trouble. Any strategy is better than no strategy.

Based on what I have learned, the next time I am in serious bear country, I will probably carry bear spray, based on what seem to me to be fairly clear, unbiased statistics. Others are welcome to do otherwise. The bottom line is that it is unlikely that any of us will ever suffer a bear mauling; we are far more likely to die in an automobile accident or suffer death by honey bee, for that matter.