Guns Don’t Kill People - People Kill People

I’ve been thinking about hunter safety lately. Growing up in Kansas means that hunting is a family tradition for us. Opening weekend of Pheasant Season was a bigger deal and a more fun “holiday” in November than Thanksgiving was. When I was at university I would often choose to come home for opening weekend rather than Thanksgiving. The thing about hunting is it is hard to put into words why we like it. As I mentioned earlier, it really is one of those things you either get or you don’t get. If it has to be explained, then you don’t get it.

Obviously the reason I am writing this is in response to VP Cheney’s shooting accident. Dude, when you are hunting birds with other people you have to be aware of where all the hunters are! Back home, inevitably, someone would bring a guest. A guest who was inevitably a city-slicker. And these city-slickers were always the ones trying to kill one of us.

To alleviate these sorts of accidents most states have hunter safety laws. In Kansas, everyone born after July 1, 1957 has to complete a Hunter Safety course in order to buy a hunting license. Anyone born before 1957 gets geezered in. I decided to check out what the law is in Texas. Well, in Texas everyone born after September 2, 1972 has to complete a hunter safety course in order to buy a license. Granted, Cheney was born in 1941 – so he would have been geezered in no matter what. But 1972? That is a lot of people running around with weapons and no hunter safety training. Probably one of the reasons is that Texas is home to many game ranches where people pay big bucks to get themselves a big buck, or some quails, or whatever. If they have too restrictive of rules regarding hunting licenses it would cut in on the profit.

Personally, I think everyone should have to complete a hunter safety course, and that a refresher pamphlet ought to be handed out with every hunting license sold.

"Hunting," the Old Man said when my noise slacked off, "is the noblest sport yet devised by the hand of man. There were mighty hunters in the Bible, and all the caves where the cave men lived are full of carvings of assorted game the head of the house drug home. If you hunt to eat, or hunt for sport for something fine, something that will make you proud, and make you remember every single detail of the day you found him and shot him, that is good too."But if there's one thing I despise it's a killer, some blood-crazy idiot that just goes around bam-bamming at everything he sees. A man who takes pleasure in death just for death's sake is rotten somewhere inside, and you'll find him doing things later in life that'll prove it."
The Old Man and The Boy, by Robert Ruark