By Philip Bourjaily David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

Last week some of the New York staff were taken out to Colorado by the National Shooting Sports Foundation who put them up in a glorified Holiday Inn where they spent a couple of days listening to presentations about the problems facing hunting in the 21st century. I didn’t go, as it is my policy not to attend industry events that don’t involve me shooting stuff. Also, I wasn’t invited.

Those who went came back with a newsflash: access to land is the number one issue facing hunters today. No kidding. It took two days in a hotel to figure that out?

We do a pretty good job of recruiting young hunters, through special hunts and seasons. It’s when the time comes for those new hunters to strike out on their own that we’re failing. If they don’t live where hunting land is plentiful, or if they don’t have dad’s deer lease to hunt on, we won’t keep them as hunters. I always remember a conversation I had with someone at Texas Parks and Wildlife about a youth program that took disadvantaged kids hunting. Being that this was Texas, where everyone pays to hunt, I asked, did any of these kids ever hunt again? “No,” he said.”It’s the only time in their lives they get to go.”

I live in a place where free access to private land remains relatively common, although that’s changing fast. There’s a big public area about twenty minutes from town. It gets hunted hard, but it’s close. In short, it’s possible if you are a high schooler or poor college student – or poor adult for that matter - to find a place to hunt nearby.

But that’s true in fewer and fewer places. It doesn’t bode well for the future of hunting if we get the next generation all excited about the sport then give them nowhere to go. Exit question: how hard is it for the young, impecunious and unconnected to find a place to hunt where you live?

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

I have an unnatural fascination with prehistoric man and, like a lot of paleontologists, spend time wondering what killed off the Neanderthals. They were around for 260,000 years in the face of some of the worst weather the earth has experienced, but 2,000 to 10,000 years after Cro-Magnons showed up, they vanished. Neanderthals lived in small family groups, and bit by bit, the groups ceased to exist. Finally, it probably came down to one man or woman, and that must have been the loneliest death imaginable.

I'm sure that last Neanderthal's last thought, just before his (or her) heart stopped was "Screw it. Why bother anymore? There's no one left."

And so it is with hunters. Hunting and shooting are intensely tribal. Only another hunter or shooter can understand what we do, and we tend to hang around with hunters and shooters of our own age. The pissant punks who can't remember before GPS and Gore-Tex and laser rangefinders will never understand how older generations view things.

Eventually, you reach the point  where you look around and there is no one left who remembers the things you do. Unlike the poor damned Neanderthal, you may not decide to die, but you very well may decide to hang up your guns. If you have no one left to share your sport with, why bother anymore?

By Philip Bourjaily David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

We hunters are an easy target for the popular media, and probably the last group not protected by P-C sensitivity. This link carries you to Monday’s installment of Non Sequitur, a predictably knee-jerk and rarely funny comic strip by Wiley Miller that appears in 700 papers nationwide.

This story line has run for the last five days or so. To get you up to speed, Lucy and Petey are a pony and a dog. Lucy, the pony, has fallen in love with a French Canadian moose. It’s moose season, and all three are in the woods, endangered by hunters or, as we’re called here “terrorists.” That’s right, Wiley uses the “T” word on us. It would be insulting if it weren’t so sadly stupid.

I can guess how you all feel about this, but if you want to vent anyway, knock yourselves out.

By Philip Bourjaily David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

I was going to post a funny video of an accidental discharge to start this post, then this news item caught my eye as a reminder that there aren’t any funny accidental discharges. This is the only fatality I’ve ever heard of at a gun club. Incredibly enough, it was the club’s manager who fired the shot. All of us, no matter how experienced, have to remember always:

1. Treat guns as if they were loaded 
2. Keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction at all times.

Arguably, rule two is more important than rule one, because if you break rule one, rule two acts as a failsafe. The only two accidental discharges I’ve personally witnessed did nothing worse than embarrass the shooters.

The first was on a trap field, where no one had told a teenager that his borrowed Model 12 would go off if he closed the action with his finger on the trigger. Fortunately, he had the gun pointed safely at the ground, and did nothing worse than blast a divot in the grass.

The second was by an old farmer who accepted our invitation to come hunt with us on his land (you know how they say you’re supposed to do that when you ask permission to hunt? Well, I don’t any more). He went into a shed to get his gun and we heard a muffled boom as he shot a neat hole through the roof from the inside.