Virginia Prince William County of Board of Supervisors is meeting at 2:45 p.m. today to consider banning the use of buckshot, commonly used in hunting
BUT, on the same day an article in the Potomac News said the vote was to open public hearings to allow slugs (the small metal kind, not people waiting for rides) in hunting:
The supervisors will vote Tuesday on whether to authorize public hearings to consider whether to allow the use of rifled slugs for hunting.
Well, it turns out the NRA knew a lot more about what was going on than the Potomac News, which reports on Wednesday Buckshot, rifled slugs debated (a misleading title, as you will see):
The decision on whether to outlaw buckshot in favor of rifled slugs for hunting generated a lot of discussion among the Prince William Board of County Supervisors on Tuesday.
[wait, I thought it was just a vote on whether to hold hearings to add slugs to the list?]
...
The board voted to pass the ordinance after Barg asked Horton to add provisions to exclude home and livestock protection.
Stirrup and Corey A. Stewart, R-Occoquan, opposed the ordinance.
A staff report showed that the notice of the change must get to the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries by registered mail before May 1 to be in effect for the 2006 hunting season.
So they did, in fact, have a real vote, and they did, in fact, ban buckshot in favor of slugs.
I could have missed it, but I don't remember reading of anybody in Prince William County being injured by errant buckshot in the last five years. Although I'm happy any time the board meets and does something OTHER than raise my taxes.
On the merits though, I think you should be able to use either type of round. We should have learned our lesson when the board realised (apparently) that they had banned the wrong thing earlier. What I mean is that this board's vote was a statement that at some previous time a previous board, obviously meddling in things the knew nothing about, banned SLUGS, when they should have banned Buckshot.
My point being that when Government micromanages, they often get it wrong, and when the "fix it" they never learn the lesson that they shouldn't be passing so many detailed directives to begin with, because they usually don't know what they are doing.
But worse, both articles were written by the same reporter, and yet the Wednesday article makes no mention of the completely incorrect Tuesday report. It's as if it never happened. To tell your readers that the BOCS is deciding whether to have public hearings to add slugs to the list of approved rounds, when in fact they were deciding to ban buckshot, was a disservice to the people who pay for the paper, and I think an acknowledgement of the error was in order.
2 comments:
Greg, why do you think that Fairfax and Prince William both restricted hunting to Buckshot prior to this vote?
Also, while I agree a good hunter would be a good hunter, there are a lot of bad hunters, especially in well-populated areas where any yahoo can go hunting with little work.
I don't mind them allowing slugs, but I don't see why they banned buckshot. After all, as you say, a good hunter would know when to use which.
And a bad hunter with buckshot seems less dangerous than the same bad hunter taking 3-5 "quick shots" with slugs wildly flying all over the place. I'm unlikely to be killed by buckshot 300 yards away, but a slug will put me or my kids down no problem with the bad hunter maybe never even knowing he hit us.
Greg:
If we're going to restrict ammunition types because it's possible that a few people might act irresponsibly,
Maybe I wasn't clear. I don't want to restrict ammunition types. I opposed banning buckshot. You seemed to be supporting the ban on buckshot because, you said:
Unfortunately some buckshot hunters attempt to use a shotgun's patterning characteristics as a way to make up for this, and fire multiple rounds as fast as they can in the hopes that one or more lethal hits are delivered. Too often this results in a wounded deer, or a mortally wounded deer that cannot be recovered and is wasted. During hunting season in PWC, you'll often hear three to five rapid-fire shots instead of a single shot, and this is the cause.
So I thought you were saying that there were a lot of bad hunters in urban areas shooting indiscriminately.
Based on what I thought YOU were saying about bad hunters, I was simply saying that I'd rather have the bad hunters shooting buckshot than slugs.
I actually don't think it's a big problem, and think that hunters by and large can be trusted to use the right load, so the supervisors were wrong to ban buckshot.
Because, as you said:
Again, an ethical hunter can use either type effectively and safely. He may choose one or the other depending on terrain, a hunting strategy, or proximity to residential areas.
I think we agree with many of your factual assertions, and I simply don't understand why you seem to support banning buckshot.
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