Klik and CH, well said and I'm listening, I really am.
The crux of the whole thing is two-pronged for me and really boils down to this:
-It is possible to be a good, safe hunter with a round in the chamber in normal hunting circumstances. About 3/4 of the volume of this thread was generated by "hot" carriers, responding to a relative few "cold" carriers, who were saying that the above wasn't possible, and that we didn't belong in the woods. You guys are not saying that and I appreciate that.
-Second, I can only speak from personal experience with regards to killing blacktail within a 60-mile radius of Eugene, Oregon. It's close, it's thick, the shooting lanes are tiny, the animals are few and far between. I don't expect someone hunting a 66% deer tag- which is Alaska for 2003 IIRC- to really "get" that, but it's a big part of things here where I hunt. We have a month to fill a single buck tag and the success rates are under 20%. I'm not blowing my one chance on a buck to solve a non-existant (or hardly-existant) safety problem.
I will concede the much more open country, where I hunt elk, it's a lot easier for me to imagine hunting cold. It would not be a handicap or at least not much of one.
Finally, and we'll never know this for sure, but I do truly believe that if carrying cold was somehow mandated the accident numbers would remain more or less the same. The details would change; they might go down some fractional amount, I'll grant that, but my opinion is that dumb azz people would find just about as many ways to screw up as they do now.
