[tellner]

According to the WaPo (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/06/AR2007010601300_pf.html) a growing number of hunters is urging the NRA to oppose the new opening of public lands to oil and gas exploitation.

It seems that hunters' access to public lands was actually better under Clinton's "roadless" policy. Its repeal didn't lead to better access for older and disabled hunters as the NRA leadership hoped, but fewer opportunities for all sportsmen as the land became the de facto property of the oil companies.

It's unintended consequences again and whose ox is being gored.

[Art Eatman]

My experience with public land leasing is that the leases are for various and specific purposes. So, I don't see how a mineral lease would affect access. Normally, one lease for a purpose: Grazing, mining, recreation. If you're drilling wells, you don't own all the uses of the leased property.

But, then, it's the Feds, so who knows?

From family experience with oil and gas wells, wildlife avoids the area around an operation during drilling and completion, but not after the well is completed and the people and drill rigs leave. Wildlife gets used to pumps and tanks and suchlike and wanders or feeds right on by. (As witness the photos of caribou grazing alongside the Alyeska pipeline.) The top of an oil storage tank can be a good deer blind, actually, albeit a bit smelly.

There's not enough useful information in the article to understand the problems to which it speaks. Too "eat up" with yammer about gun control, and really only says that this or that group is for or against something. Whoopee...Very small whoopee.

Art

[mohican]

in my neck of the woods, some evil big corporations offer great public hunting opportunities (Ohio Power) (Mead)

Exploration doesn't always mean less opportunities (viewed through the eyes of a white tail hunter)

[rbernie]

Not to lose sight of the fact that there may be legitimate issues here, but you need to read the article to its completion to understand the real dynamics at play.

This article is a thinly disguised attempt to establish legitimacy for the AHSA by giving them airtime as an alternate voice in the arena of shooting sports, and in turn give the SJMs (slack jawed morons) at the WaPo the ability to take swipes at the NRA and the Repub administration without actually having to think and work at it.

This article isn't journalism; it's barely worthy of an op/ed piece.

Trying to seize on these sentiments, a rival gun group, the American Hunters and Shooters Association (AHSA), was founded two years ago by former Washington Redskin Ray Schoenke and John Rosenthal, a real estate developer in Boston. "I believe that we have reached a tipping point where the majority of hunters and shooters realize the NRA isn't representing their interests," said Rosenthal, who is a longtime activist for handgun control.The AHSA is nothing more than a front for the Brady Bunch and a shill for the Joyce Foundation. They claim to represent us, but are founded and staffed by proven enemies of firearms, shooting sports and hunting.

The AHSA are gun grabbers, who will use your love of a bolt-action or break-open hunting tools to convince you that 'nobody needs semiautomatic rifles for hunting' and 'nobody needs magazines with more than eight round capacity', and posture these arguments into 'rational, common sense gun control' laws.

They are looking for footing in our community, for legitimacy beyond that which the media can buy them. They better not get it.

The group [AHSA] concedes that, so far, the NRA has more executives than the new group has members. That has not stopped the NRA from attacking the AHSA in its magazine, America's 1st Freedom, as a "cold, calculated attempt by the gun-ban lobby to thieve the hard-earned political credibility of gun owners and hunters."There's a reason for that - because the American Hunters and Shooters Association is not an advocacy group for hunters or shooting sports. They are the enemy, disguising themselves as us. The NRA is calling the shots correctly on this one, and we should (in this case) be circling the wagons around the NRA pretty firmly.

If the AHSA is given the ability to act and sound as a viable voice of the hunting community by 2008, we will all be very sad in 2009 and beyond.

Under different circumstances, people like the AHSA would be lined up and shot as spies and seditionists.

[langenc]

Yes we have to remember the AHSA.

On the other hand the access to 'your land and mine' is severly restricted. Farmers dont want shooters (hunters) on land with thier cows. Dont take much to figure that sob slob (not a hunter) shot one once.

Drive across ND and MT-barbwire fence on both sides of interstate for 1000 miles. We own most of it!! Try to get on.

Two years ago I traveled in S ND looking for the Nat Grassland . More barbwire on both sides of raod. Im going back to get some PDs this summer.