[Sca-cooks] OT Hunting was Re: deer and turkeys

[Christiane]

Jadeiga says:

Recently, we had a pregnant woman shot in the head accidentally when a
hunter's bullet richoceted, smashed a window in the car she was sitting
in, and hit her in the head, though she was fortunately not killed. This
was in a not-terribly-crowded township. The bullet had travelled much
farther than he could see (more than half a mile from the orchard behind
his home), and he didn't know about the accident until he heard about
the all-points bulletin.

This is the kind of thing that scares people about hunting the suburbs.
<snip>

I'm the daughter of an ex-cop who is also a hunter. Factoids I picked up from Dad include the fact that the range of a .22 centerfire rifle is a mile, and could still kill at the limits of its range. A 30-06 Springfield may travel even farther with lethal force. Most rifles used for deer hunting are high-powered ones, in that they are deadly at 1,000 yards. Hunters want something that will drop a deer quickly; Dad preferred the 30-06 when he hunted. My dad also preferred to use a scope when he hunted. But he was a damn good shot, with a lot of time at the range, and hunting since the time he was 14. For every hunter like him, though, there were at least three or four who did not have the training or the skills, firing away at the deer like Dirty Harry, not waiting for the sure shot.

We lived in an extremely crowded suburb, and I found my dad prone on the back porch in shooting position one summer day with his .22. I was shocked; but he was determined to get the squirrel who had been denuding our miniature peach trees. I watched him from the back door; 45 minutes later, I heard the rifle crack and saw the squirrel drop from the tree, a bullet in his little tiny head. My dad could do that stuff. But he knew his guns, knew his skills, and had made the cartridges himself; he covered notebook pages with calculations related to cartidge loading. Later on that summer he got the woodchuck, too. 

It takes more skills than usual to hunt safely in the suburbs. Hunters who are used to hunting in rural areas usually don't know or understand what's needed. When Princeton, N.J., had deer trouble, they didn't authorize a deer hunt. They hired a company with sharpshooters to come in there and pick off the deer with precision.

Gianotta