Kids Hunting Alone ????

[FMF DOC]

In many states, young kids may hunt alone
After Wash. accident, msnbc.com review finds lack of age requirements

AP
Brittany Zebrasky, then 8, poses with an elk taken during a New Mexico hunt in 2003. While Brittany didn't shoot the elk, she could have, as New Mexico is one of seven states with no minimum hunting ages. Brittany, who has also faced a nearly lifelong battle with brain cancer, has gone on to become a poster child for young hunters. This photo was used in support of a recent campaign to lower the hunting age in Wisconsin, where the Zebrasky family lives.
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By Mike Stuckey
Senior news editor
msnbc.com
updated 7:25 a.m. ET, Tues., July 21, 2009


Mike Stuckey
Senior news editor

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Just before Tyler Kales was led from a Mount Vernon, Wash., courtroom to begin serving his sentence earlier this month, he apologized to the family of his victim.

“All I want to say is how sorry I am,” the reed-thin 15-year-old said in a quavering voice to relatives of Pamela Almli, 54, who died instantly when Kales mistook her for a bear and shot her in the head Aug. 2, 2008, while hunting in the fog in western Washington's Skagit County.

Kales, convicted by a judge of second-degree manslaughter in June, received 30 days in juvenile detention at his July 10 sentencing.

The case highlighted issues about hunting on public land in Washington that were news to some state residents. First, hunting in close proximity to hikers was perfectly legal. Second, there was no requirement for trailhead signs to warn hikers like Almli that there were hunters in the area.

And while Kales was not old enough to have driven himself to the trailhead, in Washington state there is no minimum age for hunting without adult supervision as Kales, then 14, was doing that day with his 16-year-old brother.

Washington is far from alone in allowing children to hunt with firearms on public lands without adult supervision, an msnbc.com review of state hunting regulations found:

Seven states — Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Vermont and Washington — set no minimum age for solo hunting.
In Texas, kids can hunt alone when they are 9.
In Alaska, Louisiana and Tennessee, the minimum age for unsupervised hunting is 10, in Missouri it’s 11, and in nine other states it’s 12.
That's a total of 21 states in which kids can hunt alone at age 12 or younger. And in 19 of them, young hunters afield by themselves may pursue any game — big or small — that is in season. Laws on hunter education and licensing vary from state to state. And federal laws prohibit anyone under the age of 18 from buying a rifle or shotgun. No one under 21 may buy a handgun.

While low minimum hunting ages in some states and a complete lack of them in others may come as a surprise to non-hunters, they are supported by many members of the hunting community who say that when kids begin hunting, alone or supervised, should be up to their parents.

“I was very surprised” by the lack of a minimum hunting age, said Washington state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, a Seattle Democrat who hikes often with her husband and their golden retriever on the ubiquitous trails of the Evergreen State. A previous minimum solo hunting age of 14 in Washington was stricken by a 1994 law.


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Should there be a minimum age?

“Right now you could have a 6-year-old get a license and hunt bear,” Kohl-Welles said.

Also amazed was Kales’ defense attorney, Roy Howson, who favors a minimum age of at least 16 for solo hunting and argued that the boy should not have been charged with a crime at all. “Wasn’t this bound to happen at some point?” he asked. “If kids are allowed to hunt, sooner or later you’re likely to have something of this sort happen.”

Video


Young hunter's plea
Tyler Kales pleads for forgiveness from the family of a hiker he accidentally shot to death while hunting in Washington state last year. KING-TV reports.
MSNBC


Working with the Washington Trails Association, a hiker advocacy group, Kohl-Welles introduced a bill to set a minimum age of 16 for solo hunting in the state. The bill was bottled up this year by some lawmakers who wanted the age to be set at 14, but Kohl-Welles said she will push it again next year.

The lack of a minimum unsupervised hunting age is “a gaping hole,” said Jonathan Guzzo, the trails association’s advocacy director. “From our perspective, we viewed it as common sense. If we’re telling people, ‘You can’t drive a car unaccompanied until you’re 16,’ you shouldn’t be going into the woods with a gun until you’re 16.”

Guzzo stressed that his group is not opposed to hunting. “Hunters make huge contributions to public lands statewide and we think they are historical users of the landscape who serve an important purpose,” he said. “But we have more understanding of the limits of the human brain. Young people do not have the judgment that adults have. For the most part, 14-year-olds do not have the judgment that a 16-year-old has.”


Click for interactive map
State-by-state: When junior can hunt alone

On the national level, Guzzo’s comments won support from Jim Kessler, policy director and co-founder of the progressive think-tank Third Way who previously spent four years at Americans for Gun Safety. Both groups seek tighter gun laws but are not opposed to hunting.

“I find it shocking actually that there aren’t laws that prohibit unsupervised hunting by minors,” said Kessler. “For a lot of families, hunting is passing on values from fathers to sons and it’s about responsibility and there are a lot of good lessons there, but it is far too much responsibility to give to a child or a minor teen, far too much responsibility. You need an adult there.”

CONTINUED :

[FMF DOC]

Worries about the sport's future
But others don’t see it that way, especially many in the hunting community who are concerned that limits on hunting ages are reducing their sport’s numbers and threatening its future.
One group, Families Afield, a coalition of hunting groups that was organized with the specific goal of encouraging youth hunting, notes that since its formation in 2004 some 28 states have changed laws and rules, including lowering hunting ages. “Parents, not politics, should decide an appropriate hunting age for their children,” says the group’s Web site, which stresses hunter education and safety, and advocates no minimum age for young hunters who are supervised by adults.
Families Afield spokesman Rob Sexton said the coalition has no “official position” on minimum ages for unsupervised youth hunting. But the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance, a member group of Families Afield for which Sexton is the vice president of governmental relations, opposed the Washington legislation largely because it considered it “a knee-jerk response to a tragedy,” he said.
“We hate the thought that the law would be changed on an anecdotal situation as opposed to an overall finding that would justify such change,” said Sexton. It’s really parents of minor hunters who must make the call, even when they are older than the law requires, he said. “For instance, my oldest kid is 15 and I don’t have him hunt alone. … He’s just not ready, but I’ve hunted with younger kids who are.”
On its Web site, Families Afield cites numerous statistics and studies to support its position that hunting is not dangerous for properly trained participants. One 2002 study concludes that adult hunters are involved in 10 times as many accidents as all youth hunters, suggesting young hunters are actually statistically safer since they make up 12 percent of the entire hunting population. Adult hunters are blamed for 32 times as many as accidents as young hunters who are supervised, according to the study by the Hunter Incident Clearinghouse.
Tim Lawhern, new president of the International Hunter Education Association and the chief of hunter education in Wisconsin, said more recent statistics are even more favorable to young hunters. In his own state, while young people historically accounted for a third of all hunting accidents, much higher than their proportion of all hunters, that dropped to 13 percent last year and just 7 percent in 2007, he said.
More pressure on parents
The reason? “It’s just not cool to be involved in a hunting accident,” Lawhern said. “More people are paying attention to their kids when they’re out there doing that.”
Lawhern, who plans to focus on recruiting more young hunters in his role as IHEA president, sees no need for the government to set minimum hunting ages, whether kids are alone or supervised. “I think the important thing to remember is it’s the parent’s responsibility until they’re 18,” he said. In states with no minimum ages, “There’s no significant reports of there being a problem with young people hunting. Their incident rates are no different than anywhere else in the country.”
The Washington state case, Lawhern said, is a horrible tragedy but “that’s one incident out of how many millions of hunters around the country? … There are a lot of things we do in life when people are making decisions that could end tragically. … There’s more people injured and killed playing football.”
Kessler of Third Way said gun-rights activists and hunting enthusiasts involved with groups like Families Afield and the National Rifle Association make it unlikely laws to lower hunting ages will pass in Washington or anywhere else.
“It’s a powerful lobby,” he said. For instance, “If you did a poll in Washington or any state, 95 percent would support 16 over 14 (as a minimum solo hunting age). But the people who really care about this are the other 5 percent and that’s the way the gun issue works. They feel it’s affecting their lives, so the intensity of their feeling about this issue is much greater than for other people.”
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The NRA, the nation’s largest and most powerful gun-rights group, also believes parents, not lawmakers, should decide the appropriate age at which their children should begin hunting but did not respond to an msnbc.com inquiry on whether or not it favors a minimum age for unsupervised hunting by kids.
Advocates of minimum age requirements for solo hunters said the rules also protect the young hunters themselves. In the Washington case, said Guzzo of the trails association, the slain hiker and her family are not the only victims. The young hunter, Tyler Kales, “has to live with his judgment error for the rest of his life. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”
Kales’ defense attorney, Howson, agreed. Calling his client an “exceptional” young man who simply made a tragic mistake that likely would have been avoided if an adult had been present, Howson, a former prosecutor, said, “There’s a little bit of blame for all of us in here but it’s all going to come down on this one little kid.”

Thoughts???

[Buffalobob]

The bitter truth is than I came closer to being killed while deer huntign by someones 12 year old kid with a 410 shotgun loaded with slugs than I did by the NVA. He shot at a fox as it ran across the road and I was down the road. I keep my face to my enemies but it is my "friends" that will probably kill me.

I hunted in Idaho for elk for three years. They do not have a hunter orange requirement and I cannot begin to count the number of times hunters would wind up in my spotting scope along with a deer.

Hunter education is a great program but it must be coupled with a responsible parent.

I started shooting a 22 rifle before I was six years old and by the time I was nine I was hunting alone "on the farm" but the fence line was my limit and the single shot 22 was all I was allowed to carry. Should I be late for dinner my hunting privileges were revoked. By the time I was eleven I had earned enough money to order a Stevens Savage 311 from the Sears Roebuck Catalog. Every squirrel and rabbit I shot was cooked and eaten.


My own kids, I started out very young with an air rifle and they shoot that until they were very good. I remember the day I took my son bowhunting with me and he carried the air rifle. A doe came along and instead of me shooting it with the bow, I had him shoot it with the air rifle. That was one spooked doe but lucky to be alive!!

Anyway, my opinion is that there should be a graduated system with requirements for years hunted accompanied by an adult for small game and then more years with an adult for large game. For a person like my daughter who had never hunted before last year one would look at her achievements in 1000 yard F-class as an indication of being responsible with a rifle around other people and she never hunts alone with anything but her camera anyway.

There are a lot of responsible parents who teach their children well but there is an equal number who should not even be allowed to have children. Basically it comes down to the fact that I believe some people should be neutered soon after birth to protect the gene pool.

[swpa19]

The bitter truth is than I came closer to being killed while deer huntign by someones 12 year old kid with a 410 shotgun loaded with slugs

THAT is a sad truth. I used to see parents drop their children off at the Sportsman Club where I was an assistant instructor for Pa. Hunter Safety Courses. Then seen the same parent/child combo the night before hunting season was to open at K-Mart getting their hunting licensces. No, co-operative field times, no weapons familiarizations, just turn them loose un-supervised in the field.

Like Bob I started shooting at a young age on our property (13 acres of woodland) with a Remington 510 Targetmaster. My small game hunting gun was a very heavy (seemed like it at the time) Iver Johnson "Champion" Single barreled-hammered 30" full choked shotgun. Not much good at rabbits, but terrific on birds. I later graduated to my dads Stevens 16 ga. 311, when he bought a Browning Sweet 16 Semi.

My kids, both daughters were attendees, with me at Hunter Safety Courses. They learned shooting skills at a gun club first with a Marlin/Glenfield .22. They shot trap with a Rem. 12 ga 870. and became proficient with .22 Ruger SA revolver and Llama .380.
And, became really good with a Walther 9mm.
They were schooled in the responsiblities of owning and firing a weapon.

Teaching my kids was also a great time in my life.

[HOLLiS]

^^^ well said. Kids are like computers, Garbage in, Garbage out. It is even worse when the kid is 35 years old. To many parents do not parent.

I have nothing against a adequately trained and responsible young person hunting alone. One aspect of idiocy, it does not discriminate based on age.

[FMF DOC]

SWPA19 That wouldn't of been the Fryburg Sportsmans Club would it?

[swpa19]

FMF DOC:

SWPA19 That wouldn't of been the Fryburg Sportsmans Club would it?

No, it wouldnt. Its a Sportsmans Club here in the Pittsburgh Area, in Washington, Co. A few years back (When Charlton Heston was NRA Pres.) because of its youth orientation our Sportsmens Club was voted #1 SC in the U.S.

http://www.windedbowhunter.com/conse...ania-counties/

[FCWood]

My opinion is that parents should decide if kids should hunt alone.

I'm only a few months shy of 23 and I can remember when I always hunted with my dad. I started deer hunting when I was 10, but I was the only one with a gun that year. My dad was right beside me, but that way he only had to worry about where one weapon was pointed. Every year after that both of us were armed, but sitting side-by-side.

I was probably 15 before I had even one day of deer hunting alone. However, even before then my friends and I would go off shooting turtles or what not without a parent, but only after asking permission.

As a side note, when I was about 5 or 6 my dad walked into the house, loaded a 12 ga with 00 buck shot, then told me to come outside where he had 4x4 sheet of plywood propped up against a fence. He said, "see that sheet of plywood," and upon my answering yes he leveled the shotgun and fired at it from about 15 feet away. He then asked for me to take a look at it now and I remember vividly to this day him saying, "that's what a gun can do to a person, they are not toys, and you don't EVER touch one unless you ask me first." From that point on dad never locked the gun cabinet unless other young kids were coming to the house.

FCW

[tmax1014]

Originally Posted by FCWood

My opinion is that parents should decide if kids should hunt alone.

I'm only a few months shy of 23 and I can remember when I always hunted with my dad. I started deer hunting when I was 10, but I was the only one with a gun that year. My dad was right beside me, but that way he only had to worry about where one weapon was pointed. Every year after that both of us were armed, but sitting side-by-side.

I was probably 15 before I had even one day of deer hunting alone. However, even before then my friends and I would go off shooting turtles or what not without a parent, but only after asking permission.

As a side note, when I was about 5 or 6 my dad walked into the house, loaded a 12 ga with 00 buck shot, then told me to come outside where he had 4x4 sheet of plywood propped up against a fence. He said, "see that sheet of plywood," and upon my answering yes he leveled the shotgun and fired at it from about 15 feet away. He then asked for me to take a look at it now and I remember vividly to this day him saying, "that's what a gun can do to a person, they are not toys, and you don't EVER touch one unless you ask me first." From that point on dad never locked the gun cabinet unless other young kids were coming to the house.

FCW

Ah...shooting turtles out at the ponds, "camping" at Andy's land. Those were the days!
My father did the same with me. I was told from a young age that " guns were made to kill and that every gun is a tool not a toy. DO NOT point a gun at anything unless you mean to kill it, even 'toy' guns!"

I miss your dad buddy. He taught me just as much as my own father did!

[Defender968]

Originally Posted by FCWood

As a side note, when I was about 5 or 6 my dad walked into the house, loaded a 12 ga with 00 buck shot, then told me to come outside where he had 4x4 sheet of plywood propped up against a fence. He said, "see that sheet of plywood," and upon my answering yes he leveled the shotgun and fired at it from about 15 feet away. He then asked for me to take a look at it now and I remember vividly to this day him saying, "that's what a gun can do to a person, they are not toys, and you don't EVER touch one unless you ask me first." From that point on dad never locked the gun cabinet unless other young kids were coming to the house.

FCW

I had a similar experience.

We didn't have a gun in the house until I was about 12, but my next door neighbor and best friends dad was a veteran, former LEO and expert hunter, when we were 8 or 9 he took us (his son my best friend and I out, set up a watermelon which he informed us was the same consistency as a human head), and shot it from about 10 feet with a 12 gauge loaded with bird shot.

Just after it exploded he cleared the weapon and turned to us and said that's what could happen to one of us if the other was playing with a weapon. It made quite an impression.

Kids need to be taught the dangers of firearms period. As for hunting alone ages, that should be up to the parents, some kids are probably GTG at 10 some aren't, but the I can guarantee the Gov won’t know better than a parent, you can't legislate common sense.

[Paslode]

My first lessons with firearms were cleaning guns with dad, My first lessons of hunting were following my dad while he hunted. And all the while I got the do's and don'ts of gun and hunting safety drilled into my head.


I probably started going out on my own by age 10 with my cousins. But I doubt I would let my son do the same, not because I don't trust him but rather there are others I would not trust....like hikers wearing brown and white during deer season and hunters that shoot at sounds, movement or a flash of color.

[FCWood]

Originally Posted by tmax1014

Ah...shooting turtles out at the ponds, "camping" at Andy's land. Those were the days!
My father did the same with me. I was told from a young age that " guns were made to kill and that every gun is a tool not a toy. DO NOT point a gun at anything unless you mean to kill it, even 'toy' guns!"

I miss your dad buddy. He taught me just as much as my own father did!

"Camping"...aka pitching a tent a 2 a.m. in Jan. and trying to start fires with frost covered wood cuz Andy can't tell time.

Ha...dunno how many times I've been told that! Ya, and you only kill for two reasons. Either it was 1) causing problems (turtles in creek/ponds) or 2) for food, and whatever didn't apply to rule number 1 you better eat.

I miss him too. I was told he stayed here long enough to teach all of us what we needed to know to survive and to see us graduate from high school.

FCW

[FCWood]

Originally Posted by Defender968

I had a similar experience.

We didn't have a gun in the house until I was about 12, but my next door neighbor and best friends dad was a veteran, former LEO and expert hunter, when we were 8 or 9 he took us (his son my best friend and I out, set up a watermelon which he informed us was the same consistency as a human head), and shot it from about 10 feet with a 12 gauge loaded with bird shot.

Just after it exploded he cleared the weapon and turned to us and said that's what could happen to one of us if the other was playing with a weapon. It made quite an impression.

I've heard this is a great example also. A third way I've heard of is filling up a five gallon jug of water then blowing a hole through it.

Originally Posted by Defender968

you can't legislate common sense.

Couldn't agree more!

FCW