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Young guns barred
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Young guns barred
June 11, 2002
J. MICHAEL KELLY
OUTDOORS WRITER
Thanks to the state Legislature, some of New York's safest hunters are barred from pursuing deer with firearms.
During their recent budget deliberations, senators and assembly members approved the Department of Environmental Conservation's entire license-fee package - except for the part that would have authorized 14- and 15-year-olds to go afield with their parents or legal guardians during the regular firearms season.
That means 16 will continue to be the minimum age for big-game hunting with guns in the Empire State.
Opponents of a lower age limit focused the debate on gun violence, instead of hunting safety. The more demagogic of the doomsayers raised the specter of mass murders perpetrated by gun-toting teens.
Such arguments are naive, if not disingenuous.
Fourteen- and 15-year-olds in New York have been permitted to hunt squirrels, rabbits and other small-game animals with firearms for decades. Since the mid-1990s, even 12- and 13-year-olds have been allowed to carry guns during state small-game seasons, under strict adult supervision.
The law allows 14- and 15-year-olds to hunt deer, too, but only during the bowhunting season, with junior archery licenses.
Year-in and year-out, our young hunters have fashioned an exemplary safety record.
New York's estimated 700,000 active hunters have averaged about 66 shooting accidents per season in the past decade, but only a handful of those tragedies have involved shooters under the age of 16.
In fact, state studies have shown that the person most likely to be involved in a hunting accident is not a tyro, but a 30-something who has been going afield for a dozen or more seasons.
Local man in event final
Matt Martin of LaFayette didn't win the $100,000 first prize, but he did Central New York proud by finishing in the top 10 and qualifying for the final round in the Wal-Mart BFL All-American bass tournament, which was held Thursday through Saturday at Cross Lake in Shreveport, La.
Martin and nine others in a field of 50 boaters made it to Saturday's finals. The tourney-topper was Eddie Waits III of Pine Bluff, Ark., who caught three bass with a total weight of 5 pounds, 13 ounces, in Saturday's championship round.
As those numbers suggest, fishing was tough. Martin's final-day catch, good for seventh place, consisted of a 2-pound, 11-ounce largemouth.
.
http://www.syracuse.com/outdoors/poststandard/index.ssf?/base/sports-0/1023786923314774.xml
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
June 11, 2002
J. MICHAEL KELLY
OUTDOORS WRITER
Thanks to the state Legislature, some of New York's safest hunters are barred from pursuing deer with firearms.
During their recent budget deliberations, senators and assembly members approved the Department of Environmental Conservation's entire license-fee package - except for the part that would have authorized 14- and 15-year-olds to go afield with their parents or legal guardians during the regular firearms season.
That means 16 will continue to be the minimum age for big-game hunting with guns in the Empire State.
Opponents of a lower age limit focused the debate on gun violence, instead of hunting safety. The more demagogic of the doomsayers raised the specter of mass murders perpetrated by gun-toting teens.
Such arguments are naive, if not disingenuous.
Fourteen- and 15-year-olds in New York have been permitted to hunt squirrels, rabbits and other small-game animals with firearms for decades. Since the mid-1990s, even 12- and 13-year-olds have been allowed to carry guns during state small-game seasons, under strict adult supervision.
The law allows 14- and 15-year-olds to hunt deer, too, but only during the bowhunting season, with junior archery licenses.
Year-in and year-out, our young hunters have fashioned an exemplary safety record.
New York's estimated 700,000 active hunters have averaged about 66 shooting accidents per season in the past decade, but only a handful of those tragedies have involved shooters under the age of 16.
In fact, state studies have shown that the person most likely to be involved in a hunting accident is not a tyro, but a 30-something who has been going afield for a dozen or more seasons.
Local man in event final
Matt Martin of LaFayette didn't win the $100,000 first prize, but he did Central New York proud by finishing in the top 10 and qualifying for the final round in the Wal-Mart BFL All-American bass tournament, which was held Thursday through Saturday at Cross Lake in Shreveport, La.
Martin and nine others in a field of 50 boaters made it to Saturday's finals. The tourney-topper was Eddie Waits III of Pine Bluff, Ark., who caught three bass with a total weight of 5 pounds, 13 ounces, in Saturday's championship round.
As those numbers suggest, fishing was tough. Martin's final-day catch, good for seventh place, consisted of a 2-pound, 11-ounce largemouth.
.
http://www.syracuse.com/outdoors/poststandard/index.ssf?/base/sports-0/1023786923314774.xml
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878