Alphecca

To send someone into the woods with a long-range weapon who's not even mature enough to drive a car... [snip] That's another gross misrepresentation, ask any farmn family about kids and driving. In many cases it's not a maturity measurement but a physical one, can they see over the dashboard and operate the controls? I'll bet there are plenty of 8-year old kids who could drive down the street if their seat was high enough and the car-controls were shaped like an X-box controller.

Jeff, you might want to note that "the Humane Society of the United States" has no relation to local humane societies and animal shelters that rescue and adopt-out stray animals. HSUS is just a front group for animal-rights activists. It relies on the name-based confusion to swindle donations out of well-meaning innocent folk who think they're paying to help stray pets, when in fact their money goes to animal-rights causes.

Know what, I have met plenty of 16 year olds who should never pick up a gun, let along go tramping around in the woods with a gun, etc., etc.

Age restrictions in (just about) all cases are a load of you know what. They fail to take into account maturity. In doing so they deprive mature individuals of whatever right/privilege they restrict. Worse yet (for people nearby) age restrictions give an unearned stamp of approval to those above the arbitrary cutoff. The latter kills on the road and it'll kill in the woods too.

So, a 13-year-old girl can't go hunting with her parents, but she can get an abortion without their consent?

I just love LeFtY LoGiC.

H$U$ is attacking hunters on another front. Breeders of hunting dogs may well have to be licensed by USDA.

Check out http://saova.org/1139.html

Please join the effort to kill S1139/HR2669 (PAWS)

If these people were really worried that hunting remain as humane as possible, they would welcome young kids learning to hunt from their parents at an early age. It is clear that the people more likely to hunt irresponsibly are not the people who learned to hunt when they were young but are those who go into the woods for the first time as an adult with nothing more than a hunter's safety class and a high-powered rifle.

It's intentional.

Reality is no one gets kids attention at the age of 16. At 16 the kid wants to do anything but hang out with their parents.

And it's parents that pass along all that goes along with being a responsible hunter. And the typical parent doing so does so well before the kid's 16 (see above).

It's something that's been important in my family and the pattern is consistant and even joked about. Kids love hunting when they're young, then have "no time for it" through their late teens and then *if* they were introduced to it at a young age end up hunting again in their twenties.

This is intentional.