I took this picture on Holy Souls Mountain road coming back from town today.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about guns other than having one aimed at me in Nicaragua back in the 1980s by Marxist knuckleheads, but I digress.
Question: Would a round or two of perhaps not so well placed 180 grain hard cast lead flat nose gas checked .357 magnum bullets stop the critter, that is, if fired from a non-alloy, steel gun?
A rifle would be too unwieldy in the hermitage. Something small.
As a kid, I ran around with a .22 rifle and various types of shotguns, neither of which are all that effective with bears. It seems that one comes crashing about every month or so right near the hermitage. If a bear figures he can get free food in the hermitage, what then? Don’t forget, I have plastic sheeting for many of the walls and for the door!
UPDATE: N.S. sends in these links: – Read this. - Listen to this - Yikes!
[My guardian angel is saying: "What about me? I'm better than a gun!"]
Accompany me, Father George David Byers, S.S.L., S.T.D., as I begin life as a Catholic Priest-Hermit by choice. Holy Souls Hermitage is dedicated to the sanctification of my fellow priests, bishops, deacons & seminarians going through the purgatory of this life or the next. Prayer and sacrifice go up, of course, for both Benedict XVI and the next Successor of Saint Peter. 
