Rockrivr1
Member
.380 is a great and viable carry round
1911s in 9mm are great guns and easier to shoot then it’s brothers in 45acp.
1911s in 9mm are great guns and easier to shoot then it’s brothers in 45acp.
I teach Hunter Safety. It's a known fact that the reason hunter numbers are decreasing has nuttin' to do with how many regs there are. It has to do with lack of access to decent hunting areas. Those folks without deep pockets to buy a good parcel of private land, or don't have a non-hunting farmer for a friend, have to rely nowadays on public hunting land. There many of them have to deal with heavy pressure, negative hunting experiences and lower success rates. Those places generally are more heavily policed too. Thus after a few years of dealing with crowds of idiots with guns, because they do not have to hunt to eat, they move on to hobbies where they get more a more positive experience. Nuttin' wrong with many public hunting areas, I hunt some myself, but they are not what folks are used to seeing on T.V.
As for the idea that hunters are going to save all our gun rights. One does not have to be on a gun forum very long before they read the term "Fudd". This is a negative label put on hunters by chest pounding 2nd Amendment supporters. While interest in hunting by women is increasing at a good rate, the biggest gain in gun owners in not from hunters, but folks that just like to shoot guns. These folks don't hunt, don't care about hunting, and thus don't buy licensees/stamps/tags that help support the enforcement of gun regs and proper habitat. A vicious cycle. Less places to hunt makes for less hunters. Less hunters buying licenses makes for less area to hunt. The primary focus of antis is not in the guns and equipment most hunters use, thus, unless the hunter is also a gun enthusiast, the first controls will not affect him. #0 round mags? Heck, he ain't shot 30 rounds in the last ten deer seasons. Probably doesn't feel the need to have 3 loaded 30 rounders in his pockets besides the one in his gun. Bump stocks and pistol arm braces are not something you see in the field regularly. Heck, I have yet to see any there. Loosing them won't affect many hunters.
Game Commissions, State F&G and DNRs for the most part do a good job with what they have to work with. In my state, congress thinks they need to get involved with making game regs, many times dissing what the DNR and it's game biologists come up with. They change/make laws to get votes, not to help the deer herd or to improve the quality of the hunt. One of the first places budgets get cut is game and fishery departments. One reason you don;t see your paper regs is because of budget cuts. Finding things online is what folks do now. Heck, you don't get owner manuals for anything anymore, just a card with the .com address to go to on the box. In the last decade I haven't bought a hunting license, registered/renewed the tags for my boat or UTV or even registered a deer or turkey, other than online. Hard to even find a local mom and pop or LGS that registers deer and turkeys anymore. While I don't mind, I know it does make it hard for some. But I don't see it as taking my gun rights away.
Totally agree. Study before you try to cheat on a test.Heh-heh, my unpopular opinion is folks should buy and read a couple of reloading manuals before casting about in the sea of disinformation that is the Internet.
We have to factor in the fact most people don't train enough to know the limits of their skills and firearm.Mine?
You can kill an elephant with a .22 if you put the bullet in the right spot. And therefore arguments about what to use for what hunting is rather silly. Pick something you like shooting, figure out the limitations and go.
I teach Hunter Safety. It's a known fact that the reason hunter numbers are decreasing has nuttin' to do with how many regs there are. It has to do with lack of access to decent hunting areas. Those folks without deep pockets to buy a good parcel of private land, or don't have a non-hunting farmer for a friend, have to rely nowadays on public hunting land. There many of them have to deal with heavy pressure, negative hunting experiences and lower success rates. Those places generally are more heavily policed too. Thus after a few years of dealing with crowds of idiots with guns, because they do not have to hunt to eat, they move on to hobbies where they get more a more positive experience. Nuttin' wrong with many public hunting areas, I hunt some myself, but they are not what folks are used to seeing on T.V.
As for the idea that hunters are going to save all our gun rights. One does not have to be on a gun forum very long before they read the term "Fudd". This is a negative label put on hunters by chest pounding 2nd Amendment supporters. While interest in hunting by women is increasing at a good rate, the biggest gain in gun owners in not from hunters, but folks that just like to shoot guns. These folks don't hunt, don't care about hunting, and thus don't buy licensees/stamps/tags that help support the enforcement of gun regs and proper habitat. A vicious cycle. Less places to hunt makes for less hunters. Less hunters buying licenses makes for less area to hunt. The primary focus of antis is not in the guns and equipment most hunters use, thus, unless the hunter is also a gun enthusiast, the first controls will not affect him. #0 round mags? Heck, he ain't shot 30 rounds in the last ten deer seasons. Probably doesn't feel the need to have 3 loaded 30 rounders in his pockets besides the one in his gun. Bump stocks and pistol arm braces are not something you see in the field regularly. Heck, I have yet to see any there. Loosing them won't affect many hunters.
Game Commissions, State F&G and DNRs for the most part do a good job with what they have to work with. In my state, congress thinks they need to get involved with making game regs, many times dissing what the DNR and it's game biologists come up with. They change/make laws to get votes, not to help the deer herd or to improve the quality of the hunt. One of the first places budgets get cut is game and fishery departments. One reason you don;t see your paper regs is because of budget cuts. Finding things online is what folks do now. Heck, you don't get owner manuals for anything anymore, just a card with the .com address to go to on the box. In the last decade I haven't bought a hunting license, registered/renewed the tags for my boat or UTV or even registered a deer or turkey, other than online. Hard to even find a local mom and pop or LGS that registers deer and turkeys anymore. While I don't mind, I know it does make it hard for some. But I don't see it as taking my gun rights away.
I agree 100% that this is nonsense. The animals don't know what day it is, and all religions (or no religion) are supposed to be accepted in the US, not to mention the idea that hunting is a relaxing activity on this "day of rest" being a valid argument- the "day of rest" for Jews is Saturday, with the muslims so designating Friday- so should all hunting be banned on all Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays so as not to offend any specific religious group? And it is patently unfair in that the varying work schedules people have shouldn't prevent them from enjoying natural resources due to what day of the week it is.
I tend to agree also, but this is a archaic regulation that was decided by lawmakers based on religion, not by game managers concerned with game numbers. Similar to no liquor sales on Sundays. Agina a reg designed to make voters happy, not hunters.
i won't insult you, but anyone telling me they shoot 22lr at 300 yards with any success, I will ask them to prove it in front of me. My Savage will do 1/2" at 50 yards all day, even in moderate winds, but at 100, that goes up to 6", from bullet drift. 300 seems unrealistic. I tell people to get a Glock. Nothing will burn you from the sport more than an unreliable first gun. Unlikely to get that with a Glock. BTW, im a 1911 guy.
I do like your thread idea.
@Tortuga
A very informative post about an issue I had no idea about due to only hunting groups and soda cans.
@Tortuga, I tend to agree. The hunting regs and the fishing regs here in WA are approaching 1/2 thick. And subject to being superseded at anytime due to an online update.
not at all related to there being "less public hunting land
No anti-gunner is convinced when you chastise them for calling an AR an assault rifle because it’s not select fire. It could accurately be called an assault-style or military-style rifle. Does any of that change their views on the matter? No. Probably not.
I think it's important to push back because it's important that words still mean something... So whether it's colloquially by the media or in ill-considered executive orders I think we have to hold the line and insist that wishful thinking doesn't make something into something else.
I’ve been a Pennsylvania hunter for a lot of years now, and you’re right on the mark. My son and his friends are very enthusiastic about hunting, which is becoming vanishingly rare among 17 year olds. I can’t get over the way the local game warden treats them like a bunch of potential criminals.At risk of going ape on this forum and losing what little credibility I've established (if any), my experience is basically 100% opposite of yours and I think you'd have to really be out of touch with most of the hunting community to believe any of what you wrote. I'm going to try to take the high road here, but you're writing with so much confidence about something I know factually is not at all in agreement with what people are saying in the towns I live in and multiple communities of sportsman I've been involved with in multiple states. As a subsistence hunter from a family of subsistence hunters within a town of subsistence hunters, I've always wanted an opportunity to meet one of you guys and explain my perspective, and now I see why these kinds of asinine rules are getting passed.
For starters, I still live in very close to the area I grew up at and hunting in general isn't something young people want to do. It's not at all related to there being "less public hunting land" and I have no idea where you're getting this impression. I won't argue that there's definitely less of it around, but there's still literally 1.5 million acres in this state of public hunting land in PA. That's not even including the millions in private hunting land you can access without a license (and having to deal with the game commission at all). So even if all 740,000 registered hunters in my state were out at once at the same day at the exact same time (which they aren't), they'd each have over 2000 acres. So I don't understand how in the world you're even drawing that conclusion.
As an aside, that total number of hunters is down over 250,000 hunters since the late 80s.
And no, there's no shortage of animals or wildlife. Again. I have no idea how you arrived at this conclusion. The problem is, for the last 4 freaking years, most hunters didn't see a "legal" deer because the Game Commission kept changing what a "legal" buck was and kept adding literal clownworld tier rules.
Not even including the egregious list I originally mentioned in my first post, let's just consider deer opening on Saturday two years ago. Why? No reason is given! The Game Commission just decided to do it that way (I'm sure it's not at all related to the people they busted doing it Friday because it opened that same Friday for freaking decades). So whatever -- it opens Saturday. But wait! We couldn't hunt on Sunday! But that's okay, because it continues into Monday.
Who do you think is going to go to deer camp on Friday night, get up early to hunt one day, wait around camp all day Sunday holding their pinkies, and then hunt again on Monday?
And you think people aren't hunting as much as they used to because there's less deer or less land?
Seriously?
Subsistence hunters have jobs. They can't afford to take all that time off in hopes that it doesn't rain that one day so they might see a monster buck so they can legally shoot it and feed their family. Most of the hunters I know don't even care about points. That's the yuppie trophy hunters I mentioned earlier. These other guys are just trying to put food on the table, and they only hunt antlered just because it comes in before antlerless (again -- nobody knows why -- but the game commission just does this). If we just waited for antlerless, the deer are already spooked by the time it rolls around and seeing a deer is half as likely.
By the way, that's only if you win the drawing to get an antlerless license.
And that's also unless you buy a muzzleloader or a buy percussion cap operated gun. That way, then you can also buy a special license to hunt muzzle loader. OR you can buy a crossbow or buy a bow. Then you can buy an archery permit and hunt before everyone else.
Not trying to be a jerk here, but do you maybe see a pattern here that might be preventing impoverished young people from hunting more than this fantasy that there's no land or there's no deer? Nobody wants to buy all that crap to maybe go hunting one day.
On top of this, a lot of young people are moving away from the hobby because society is largely promoting the idea that it's barbaric. Young people are softer now, and the entire enterprise of hunting is seen as primitive and archaic whereas cosmopolitan progressive lifestyles as promoted as more trendy. We have enough problems promoting this tradition in light of contemporary society alone. Now their parents who want their kids to get involved can't afford to because they have to spend hundreds of dollars on licenses and new tags that used to be covered, the (now) required hunter safety course which takes days (or requires internet), the ever inflating costs of ammunition, equipment, and firearms -- the list goes on. You don't have to look even past this forum to see the many adults learners who want to get into it but can't find a mentor because they don't know how to do it or what's legal / what isn't.
So then you argue that this isn't a big deal because hunters aren't a large contributor to second amendment rights because "the fudds." Are you nuts?! Plenty of hunters are big second amendment supporters! Plenty of hunters use AR-15s! Plenty of hunters use 30 round mags! Plenty of hunters are survivalists! And most importantly, plenty of hunters vote on the 2nd Amendment as an issue! Just because you have some hunters that don't care about those rights doesn't mean they represent even half of the hunters out there!
You would have to be so out of touch with the hunting community to think this, and this interaction has completely helped fill in the gaps as to why game commission is passing the rules they do.
As an aside, the reason hunters are a less pronounced group of voters is simply because there are way less hunters than there used to be. To think this is because there's less land or wildlife is topsy-turvy.
As for game commissions doing a "great job," I think you'd be surprised to hear what subsistence hunters have to say about that. Literally all the deer in Pennsylvania aren't native to our state because they were hunted to extinction whenever the game commission screwed it up years ago. Now we have Chronic Wasting Disease throughout the entire state (which isn't under control years later). Lyme's Disease is so prevalent in the state that the government is offering money to people who get it as a reoperations for it due to their failure to control it. The game commission regularly does "burns" without reason over large parts of the state because it makes parts more available to hikers (and killing a boatload of wildlife in the process). Also, for some reason, they spent boatloads of money on this big campaign for decades adamantly denying there were mountain lions in the state. Now that everybody and their brother has a trail cam and they've been recorded, all these esteemed biologists you're talking up have egg on their face and seem a lot less credible.
Meanwhile, you're patting these guys on the back for going around busting Elmer Fudd for using copper bullets or shooting a deer that has 2.5 inches up on the brow instead of 3.
I'm one of the more forgiving people in this community because I think we need these people. Again, I know this sounds extremely confrontational on my part, but if you're really working closely with these guys you'd be doing yourself (and us all) a huge favor and if you went into the actual towns where people don't see hunting as a luxury sport and just ask them what they think about the game commission or why there are so few hunters instead of wherever you're getting kooky ideas from.
I sincerely think you're going to be surprised what you hear.
100% agree.
Wrong again.
This law specifically was passed and largely supported by hunters when they originated back in the 19th century when the law was passed by colonists. That's how old it is. It also makes no freaking sense, as virtually most other colonies had these laws and got rid of them decades ago. Hunters refuse to change it, as per the point of my original post.