Unpopular or unconventional opinions thread.

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1911s are an outdated, awkward design.
"A finely tuned 1911 is reliable and a pleasure to shoot." That's right, they are, and I love finely tuned 1911s. But I also think steam engines are awesome, and I don't claim that getting one running smoothly and reliably is the best use of my time or money unless its entire point is as a project and toy.
Spend weeks or $2000 for a gun that's tuned up--and needs hand-fitting replacement parts in the future--if you want, it's your money. Or buy any three modernized pistols that saw an engineer this century, and shoot them right out of the box.
 
Assault rifles, binary triggers, bump stocks have, in the eyes of the public, made all gun owners look bad. Very bad.
 
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.


Just FYI, Tortuga's from Pennsylvania, and lack of public hunting grounds isn't an issue. I am not in favor of many of the issues Tortuga listed (No paper game regs with the license? Seriously, when so many regulations are WMU specific and not statewide?), but Pennsylvanians have tremendous access to land open for hunting. So, it may be the regs and how they're enforced that's turning people off.
 
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.
Totally agree. Study before you try to cheat on a test.
At least that way you will know if you're copying of the right test.;)
 
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.
We have to factor in the fact most people don't train enough to know the limits of their skills and firearm.
I'm firmly in the I use what I want because I want to crowd.
 
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.

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.

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.

100% agree.

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.

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.
 
@Tortuga
A very informative post about an issue I had no idea about due to only hunting groups and soda cans.

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.

Trust me, I'm not talking groups at 300 (that would be impressive though) more or less just talking about slapping a steel target, one of those 12x18s at 300 is a dandy goal. Its absolutely do-able even in bad conditions. And imo will put you ahead of the game as far as money spent to learn distance shooting.

And I recommend glocks all the time. Especially for first time gun owners. 1911s I reccomended when they want a range toy. I carry a 10mm 1911 and the wife carries a glock 43 hah.
 
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@Tortuga
A very informative post about an issue I had no idea about due to only hunting groups and soda cans.

Like I said to the individual I retorted, I really don't mean to come off as a jerk, but the thing is a lot of us needed to hunt to live growing up. Having family members risking jail time or fines just to put food on the table so government institutions could appeal rich people who treated hunting as a luxury sport really grinds my gears. I still see those regions suffering economically, and now it's even worse because many are destroyed by opioid abuse.

Then these guys get up in the morning and say "YOU KNOW WHAT? IT'S TOO EASY TO SHOOT A DEER! LET'S MAKE IT SO YOU NEED 14 CENTIMERS OUT OF THE LEFT BRINE ON 1/4TH OF A QUARTER OF AN INCH OF THE EAST SIDE OF THE STATE AND 13 CENITMERS ON THE RIGHT IN WMU 13B12Z91.45"

For the record, they did return to printing paper manuals after people complained, but a lot of folks got busted that year because they unleashed all of these sudden changes that nobody knew about because they didn't print manuals.

And again, not to be a right-wing conspiracy nutjob here, but I don't think that was a mistake and I think they intentionally play games like that because they grossly profit off of it.
 
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@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.
 
@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.

I think what's happened is those guys are used to their own success due to how popular those pastimes have always been in this country, so they have no problem doing this kind of stuff to people.

The problem is nowadays, unless you can kill an elk with an Xbox controller or row a boat from your computer desk, most kids don't want to do it. By the time these guys in charge wake up and realize what's going on they're not going to have the support they need and they're going to lose out.
 
What is a successful argument? I guess one definition would include its ability to convince someone with an opposing view.

The “modern sporting rifle not assault rifle” is a weak argument.

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.

Modern sporting rifle is an interesting choice as well. Which sport? 3 gun/practical shooting? Oh, you mean simulated combat/assault? Service rifle bulls eye shooting? Oh, you mean military service rifle? Modern sporting seems like you’re trying to justify it as a hunting rifle or something, which isn’t a winning argument for needing an AR. Yeah, I get that you can hunt with it, but...

I think defensive rifle is reasonable alternative nomenclature, but I don’t hear that much.

(This is a great topic BTW , kudos OP)
 
not at all related to there being "less public hunting land

Where I am, the farms that used to allow hunting are being bought up, leased out or sold off in lots.

There's substantial public land to hunt, but it gets a ton of pressure. Old right-of-ways that used to allow access have been turned over to private landowners. A road about 4 miles long that has public hunting on both sides as well as a creek with some great fishing was gifted from the state to the local village for a bike path. No motor vehicles allowed. Without access to the land, the right to hunt it is meaningless.

There's also about 6,000 acres (same state "wildlife area") that are available to the public to hunt, except you can't hunt turkeys there unless you're a youth.

So, in the very rural, BFE area I live in a lot of people have given up hunting due to the lack of accessible land to hunt.
 
10-22 sucks.

ok it’s not a bad rifle but it’s become the base model erector set gun. I greatly prefer the marlin 60.

and on the topic of 22s the Henry is trash for what it’s primary purpose is simply because it does not have a safety, and they are marketed towards kids. Same goes for their centerfire levers. Put a safety somewhere on it. It does t have to be big or bulky. Maybe a decocker or something, just give me a way to make the rifle safe when shtuff happens while the hammer is back. I already shot 1 boot because of it...
 
And now for something completely different...

Many folks who shoot blackpowder and blackpowder substitutes bad mouth Pyrodex (a substitute produced by Hodgdon) as excessively corrosive, the worst possible powder to use, instant rust in a jar, etc.

I like Pyrodex. It’s not as expensive as other muzzleloader propellants, and usually available even in today’s extraordinary circumstances. I load a lot of it in cartridges and shotshells for cowboy action competition. I prep my guns with Mobil 1 grease before a match and I clean my firearms a few hours after shooting them and have no rust or corrosion problems. It makes me wonder what I am doing differently than those who complain about Pyrodex are doing. I’m definitely in the minority on this one.
 
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. For example the previous administration banned bump stocks by calling them machine guns. But the phrase "machine gun" has a precise legal & technical definition written into the language of the statutes. Fortunately it appears that it was overturned by the courts earlier today, probably because of that exact reason. 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 don’t care for Glocks. I like Red Dots on lever actions. Hunt with an AR if you want. The animals don’t know what kind of rifle sent the bullet. I don’t care for AR pistols. I also like suppressors on lever actions. If you’re hunting for fun get a bow. If it’s because you’re hungry you need a gun.
 
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 do agree that words have meaning, but the whole assault rifle moniker truly was created and liberally applied by our industry for at least a decade or more specifically referring to semi-auto military style rifles. Assault Weapons I believe was a media/politician invented term which seemed to come into being to rope in pistols like the much feared Tech9 and cylinder style shotguns in the early 1990s news programs. It was only after the AWB that some people on our side began laying off the AR title. There was still some in the industry making the point of "post-ban assault rifles" until it finally got through people's noggins the public was well bought into the news media coverage making the label evil. It went quiet for a while and we had a rebirth of interest in the guns after 2001 and the subsequent AWB sunset. I think our industry terminology rewrite truly happened around the time of the Zumbo kerfluffle. The old guard of traditional hunting writers had to eat crow and start extolling the virtues of what is now the MSR and people began saying a true AR meant select fire.

Saying all this does not change my opinion on magazine semi auto rifles. I like them a lot and own/shot many different versions for a long time pre-/during/post-AWB on through today. Just cringe a little when I hear people play word jenga with AR knowing anyone with a little Google time can prove you wrong. I suspect it makes us look deceitful or arrogant to non-supporters (antis don't care as it is).
 
I have a few more (dons flame suit)
The saying "a pistol is only for getting to your rifle" imo is a coping mechanism for being a lousy pistol shot. Train harder, get better, shoot longer distances, it will help your pistol game.

People who go nuts over what high end .22s and air pistols cost have no understanding of the precision and manufacturing that goes into them.

The metric system is vastly superior to the imperial system when measuring and building things. 12 inches in a foot? 3 feet per yard? Wrenches in fractions? Get out of my office. Metric is so much easier. (This might be because I'm a product of 90s and early 00s public schooling though)
 
I agree, bring on the metric system. I hate that I need to teach my kids both systems.

I don't like Glocks.

Requiring hunters ed is stupid. 2 hours of gun safety and 1.5 days of habitat/game management. Gun safety I can get on board with, if it's not required just recommended. The rest is taught in science class.

I think the debate around calibers is largely irrelevant. When all the pertinent numbers are within 5% of comparables, it doesn't matter. Along the same lines as a previous poster that many calibers are redundant.

People that allowed the government to raise their kids in public schools/sports don't have the right to complain about the younger generations. They failed in one of the main jobs of a parent, teach your kids the way they should go and from that they will not wander. The younger generations are behaving exactly as they were taught by the government.
 
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.
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.
The same knucklehead has decided that, no matter the legality of using feeders, he just doesn’t like them or those who use them. I hope it’s just the local guy, but I’ve never heard of nor seen a more jumped-up excuse for a law enforcement officer.
 
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