The Coral Gables Times

WE CAN STOP HUNTING ACCIDENTS Hunter training could protect the principal victims—young beginners and innocent bystanders

BY JHAN AND JUNE ROBBINS ON A BRISK NOVEMBER DAY last year the Edward Wilson family moved from their Philadelphia apartment to Bucks County, thirty miles away. Like thousands of others, they believed that the best way to bring up healthy children was in an environment of green trees and open fields. The mother, busy unpacking, smilingly told her six-year-old daughter, "You're a country girl now! Run along and explore the woods." A few minutes later she heard a noise like a distant backfire. Her little girl fled into the house, sobbing, "There's a lot of holes in my dress!" The child's wide, red skirt, blowing before her in the wind, had been shredded by a shotgun blast. On that same day, in Wyoming, an eighteen-year-old boy on his third hunting trip was stopped in mid-field by a reproachful deputy sheriff. "Quit dragging your gun by the barrel!" the deputy snapped. "You'll get hurt." An hour later the youth's body was found hanging over a wire fence, shot through the stomach by his own rifle. His father had shown him how to load, aim, shoot, and clean his weapon, but no one had ever taught him how to get under a fence with it. Today no one can hope to ignore the hunting-casualty problem. Rapid transportation takes hunters to areas they have never invaded before. At the same time the rush to the suburbs has brought hunters into everyone's dooryard. Within the perimeters of our cities there is a tempting surplus of rabbit, woodchuck, and even deer. One out of every ten American males over the age of fifteen owns a shotgun, rifle, or both. Fifteen million take out hunting licenses each year. During the usual ten-week season, they spend 169 million man-days hunting. Most use their weapons skillfully and responsibly. A lethal minority, however, each year kills 600 to 800 persons in hunting accidents and injures about 3500 persons more. Some argue that, considering the large number of people engaged in the sport, this casualty rate is not high. Yet, if as many as 800 deaths occurred each fall on our high-school and college gridirons, there is no doubt that the sport would long ago have been abruptly halted or radically changed by outraged public protest. A large number of hunting accidents involve the very young. Youths 16 to 19 years old are the group most likely to be shot down—or to shoot someone. They account for 46% of all accidents and supply 39% of the victims! No other sport is so dangerous for innocent bystanders. HERE IS THE KIND of crass stupidity that causes hunting accidents: In Texas, a hunter used his gun to beat back brush in a deep thicket. A twig twitched the trigger. The man's closest friend, walking just behind him, was instantly killed. In Gasconade County, Missouri, an excited teen-age boy fired too fast and too low as his dog flushed a covey of quail. He shot his sister who was standing on the other side of the field. In a suburb near Des Moines, a young mother was killed when a car driven by her husband struck a bump and jolted the loaded gun lying on the back seat. In Vermont, a boy climbing a hill turned and extended his rifle, butt end first, to help his father ascend the steep trail. The father slipped, made a grab at the gunstock, yanked the trigger, and shot his son through the neck. Protected by the Constitutional guarantee, "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," some hunters travel on public buses or even demand service in restaurants with guns clutched legally between their knees! Says Bryan Burgin, head of New York State's Hunter Training Program, "The dangers of hunting cannot sensibly be compared to those of other sports. The only useful analogy is to automobile driving. No one gets a driver's license until he has proved that he can drive safely. We know that innocent people's lives are in jeopardy when an ignorant and incompetent driver takes the wheel. We probably can't run all of those people out of the woods any more than we can get all of them off the road—but it's time for every state in the nation to try." Eleven states now have laws compelling at least a part of its young hunting population to study and pass a hunter-safety course. They are New York, California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Montana, Massachusetts, Connecticut, South Dakota, Minnesota, Washington, and Utah. All of them found out—the hard way—that a compulsory hunter safety-education program is easy to talk about but extremely difficult to get started. New York State's law, the first to be passed, originally ordered state game protectors to conduct all the training classes for youngsters under sixteen. Thousands of boys appeared. Game protectors were completely swamped. OTHER STATES that followed New York's example recruited instructors by newspaper advertisement and word of mouth. Their skill with guns was vouched for but, unfortunately, many early safety instructors proved to be too negligent or too softhearted to weed out the very applicants the states were most anxious to bar from the woods. In 1950, the National Rifle Association entered the state training picture. The organization, with a membership of 435,000 and 10,200 chartered local gun clubs, has been teaching young people since 1926. Under their sponsorship three and a Continued on page 8 Suburbia Today, October 1961 7