Do You *Really* Need to Shoot Deer on Sunday, Too?

Because I live about, oh, 400 yards from state game lands, the first day of deer season here in Pennsylvania is always a shattering experience. It begins at first light, with a "KABOOM!" echoing across the valley. A few minutes later, more gunshots ring out in answer. And so it goes for most of the day. It's like living in Bosnia, circa 1994.

My neighbors and I all spend the week(s) of hunting season looking forward to Sunday, when the gunfire stops and we can go out and walk in the woods without having to put fluorescent orange kevlar vests on the dogs. So I was amazed to learn that Pennsylvania is one of the last states in the Union that bans Sunday hunting.

This seems like an eminently good idea — as I wrote in this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed yesterday. But then, I'm not a hunter. I was intrigued to learn, via the Pennsylvania Game Commission, that it helps hunters, too. Adding Sunday hunting would require the game authorities to shorten hunting seasons, restrict bag limits, and could result in private landowners withdrawing their lands from public hunting access programs. Finally, the Game Commission's own surveys have never indicated majority support for the idea—even among hunters.

In fact, banning Sunday hunting such a good idea that the National Rifle Association opposes it. The NRA's relentless, nationwide campaign has succeeded in overturning Sunday hunting bans in New York, among other states. They claim it treats hunters as "second-class citizens," but I fail to see where the Second Amendment guarantees the right of the people to bear arms in the woods on Sundays. It hasn't worked so far in Pennsylvania, in part thanks to opposition from the powerful farmers' lobby, but this state of affairs might not last forever, particularly given the vast power of the NRA — and their tendency to overreach on these things. (They also tend to oppose anti-poaching laws, as they have in PA.)

The truth is that hunting is on the decline. Sunday hunting is not going to bring it back; and for one group of people (whose numbers are shrinking) to demand that the woods be reserved for their use, seven days a week, is the height of selfishness.

The piece is sure to spark debate; it already has, based on my appearance today on KDKA Radio. To anyone who disagrees with me, I'd just say this: Be careful what you wish for.

The Fire Last Time

I've long admired Tim Egan's reporting for the NYT, because it seemed to come from a genuine connection with and love for his native Pacific Northwest; plus, it reminded New Yorkers that there was, in fact, a whole entire country out there beyond the brown clouds over New Jersey.

In his latest book, The Big Burn, he spools out a history of the catastrophic forest fires that swept across Idaho and Montana in 1912. Teddy Roosevelt's newly-created National Forest system was still a sizzling-hot controversy, with the usual extractive-industry ho's making all kinds of noise against the whole crazy radical idea of not cutting down every single tree west of the Mississippi.

Eight decades later, not much has changed. Oil and gas companies screech bloody murder at any suggestion that they can't drill everywhere they want to, right now. The only reason the West hasn't been totally raped is because, way back at the turn of the last century, Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot (and John Muir) showed rare courage and vision.

From my Washington Post review of The Big Burn:

What's most striking is how little has really changed since then. Huge corporations still angle for Western resources, misusing laws intended to encourage homesteading to help themselves to the oil, gas and minerals that lie underneath the Rockies. Recent immigrants are still despised in many political quarters, and our African American president has been portrayed as a monkey by his foes. And politicians, particularly Republicans, insist on invoking Teddy Roosevelt's name when in truth his progressive, anti-corporate and pro-conservation agenda would get him branded a radical tree-hugger today.