Starvin Larry

 Fellow Hunters,

It’s never been more clear that now is the time to act. The hunter numbers are in, and they’re not good.  Preliminary findings of U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation indicate a 5-year fall-off of over 2 million hunters. Since 1980, hunter numbers have fallen from nearly 18 million to the current count of 10.5 million. The preliminary findings are summarized well here. The future of conservation in this country relies heavily on our collective ability to reverse a devastating trend in hunter participation.

But what can we do about it?

1. Accept reality. Lack of access is choking us. Land sales and hunting leases are going to continue to eat up large tracts of land, and public land is going to get more pressure than your old honey hole. I miss my old honey hole, too… you know the one… the place we lost when Grandpa sold the farm, or when that trusty old CRP became a corn field. When you do find a good spot on public land there may be other hunters there, fearing running into you as much as you feared running into them. Be gracious, you’re probably a couple kind words from being hunting buddies. And, please if you take nothing else from this letter, ask yourself who really gives a shit whether they shoot a crossbow, or they shoot an autoloader, or they have the wrong brand of camo. They’re on our team, stop focusing so much on what makes us different.

2. While we’re accepting reality, let’s accept this: The world has changed and will continue to do so. We are not going to rid the world of video games and cell phones. There’s nothing we can do about 80-game soccer leagues for 10 year-olds. People are going to continue to move away from rural areas. Families are going to lose their farms to inheritance taxes. Baby boomers are going to age out of their hunting days in the next 10 years. Anti-hunting and anti-gun organizations are only going to pick up steam during this presidency – just like gun and ammo sales picked up steam during the last presidency. Millennials are going to continue hunting for different reasons than generations-past. As hunters, we need to learn to thrive inside of the constraints of these tectonic realities. Here are some examples of things each of us can do, 1) hold a wild game feed and invite the families from the soccer team, 2) start a trap league, rather than joining a golf league, 3) create hunting opportunities for youth in programs like National Archery in the Schools, and high school trap teams, 4) get your whole family involved in your local Ducks Unlimited, National Wild Turkey Federation, or Pheasants Forever chapter.

3. No matter who you are, what you look like, or where you’re from if you care about the future of hunting, you have to figure out ways to bring a new person this hunting season. It doesn’t need to be a kid, the person doesn’t even need to shoot, but we need to invite them to come along. No one learned to love hunting through a social media post or a hunting show. You and I need to intentionally seek them out, invite them, bring them along and teach them. If each of us brought 1 new person every 10 times we go we could reverse this trend. If you’re up for the challenge, consider taking the National Hunting and Fishing Day Pledge.  When you do so you’ll be entered to win all kinds of really cool experiences from Bass Pro Shops, NASCAR, and more.

Read more @ 

http://blog.powderhook.com/an-open-letter-to-hunters/?utm_source=All+Users&utm_campaign=0442ee6225-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_12_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1d13eda3ac-0442ee6225-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&ct=t%28National+Newsletter+%2810-4-17%29%29

Wayne Pacelle and HSUS fire up the anti- hunting machine for yet another sleazy underhanded attempt to ban hunting.

They will never stop- ever.

It’s up to sportsmen, ranchers, and pet owners to stop these people. Among the stated goals of HSUS- ban all hunting and trapping, ban raising any animals for food, ban ownership of any animals, aaaannddd- force us all to become vegan.

Even the crazy cat ladies should be fighting HSUS and helping to expose their lies, half truths and obfuscation.

HSUS operates zero animal shelters, HSUS does nothing to rescue animals, HSUS pays Wayne Pacelle almost a half million per year salary. That $$ comes from donations via their lying, misleading, fact twisting TV commercials.
https://nationaldeeralliance.com/editorial/hsus-plans-ballot-initiative-to-ban-big-cat-hunting-and-trapping-in-arizona

  Y J.R.; PHOTOS BY JOHN HAFNEROCTOBER 9, 2017

Do You Know How to Score a Whitetail?

Bad Boys. Bruisers. Booners. Many nicknames describe huge whitetail bucks, but I like Booner most. It means that the buck’s antlers are so big that they are listed in the Boone and Crockett record book.

Net about 190 as a typical, 210 as a non-typical

The most commonly used scoring system for giving recognition to exceptional North American big-game animals is the Boone and Crockett (B&C) system. Here is some background on the Boone and Crockett record book, instructions on how to measure and score a buck, and information on what it takes for a buck to become a Booner.

Boone and Crockett Club

Even before record books were invented, hunters have always recorded the sizes and measurements of racks on the deer they killed. This helped sportsmen remember how big the animals were and compare them to bucks shot by other hunters. But without one universal way to measure and tally rack sizes, many hunters argued which bucks truly were the biggest.

Net high-140s as an 8-pointer

The Boone and Crockett Club is a non-profit organization of avid big-game hunters founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt. In 1949, an official committee of B&C members tackled the task of broadening the scope of the club’s existing, basic system to a more comprehensive, equitable and objective measurement system intended to give recognition to exceptional North American big game animals. Their efforts resulted in a scoring system that is impartial, honest and fair. They called it the Boone and Crockett scoring system.

Hunters love using the B&C scoring system to compare animals and talk about big bucks. It’s definitely better than just arguing about which buck is the biggest. Now, when a hunter asks another hunter how big his deer was, it’s easy to answer with a B&C score.

Don’t Miss: Realtree’s New Booner News

The Record Book

Net low-150s as a 9-pointer

The Boone and Crockett club publishes one official record book that all hunters can use to register and document their buck’s score. This way, all the facts about the deer — its size, who shot it and where — can be documented forever. The newest Booners are added in every three years in their Awards book. Every six years, all-time qualifiers are added to the ongoing all-time records book.

In addition to the typical and non-typical categories, the record books also offer two award categories: award and all-time. The award recognition category stays printed in the book for three years, while the all-Time category trophies stay in the book forever. For whitetails, the minimum scores to make it in the record books are as follows:

Read more @

https://www.realtree.com/deer-hunting/articles/how-to-score-a-buck-on-the-boone-and-crocket-scale

https://www.ksl.com/?sid=46118645&nid=148&title=chief-fires-officer-who-arrested-u-nurse-lieutenant-demoted

http://www.zerothposition.com/2017/10/11/guns-bulwark-tyranny/

The cops/ FBI can’t keep the lies straight any more.

Every day shit changes- timeline, break- in at Paddock’s house, number of rounds fired, Tannerite and ammonium nitrate found in his car- newsflash… Tannerite is mostly ammonium nitrate. The so- called journalists reporting on this don’t do journalism- they just report what cops/ FBI tell them to report.

Morons. 

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/10/11/mgm-resorts-disputes-las-vegas-police-timeline-shooting.amp.html

When the rapid-fire gunshots started raining down from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, musicianCaleb Keeter, guitarist for Josh Abbott Band, was caught in the fray alongside bandmates, crew members, and friends. When the bullets stopped, more than 50 concertgoers were dead, and more than 500 were injured. Keeter made it out alive, but witnessing the carnage firsthand deeply affected him.

In a message posted on Twitter the day after the shooting, Keeter described writing goodbye notes to his loved ones and not knowing if he was going to make it through the night. “I have been a proponent of the second amendment my entire life,” he wrote. “Until the events of last night. I cannot express how wrong I was.”

 tweet from asshat

 Members of Keeter’s crew had concealed handgun licenses, and there were legal guns on the band’s tour bus. “They were useless,” Keeter wrote. “We couldn’t touch them for fear police might think we were part of the massacre and shoot us. One man laid waste to a city with dedicated, fearless police officers desperately trying to help, because of access to an insane amount of firepower. Enough is enough.”

 Keeter called for gun control “right now.” “My biggest regret,” he wrote, “is that I stubbornly didn’t realize it until my brothers on the road and myself were threatened by it.”

Make no mistake: Keeter’s statement was brave and necessary, and his willingness to publicly say, “I was wrong” is admirable. We’ve all experienced moments of understanding and clarity that arose from firsthand experience—truths we were too hardheaded to admit until they became horrifically, unbearably obvious.

 But Keeter’s change of heart illustrates a recurring theme among conservatives: an unwillingness to budge on an issue until it affects them directly.

Women’s rights are a gratuitous “special interest”until you have a daughter. Climate change is hippie propaganda until your Miami condo is underwater. Gun control is a liberal conspiracy until a madman loads thousands of rounds into 33 legally purchased weapons of war and starts massacring the crowd you’re standing in.

tweet from another asshat

 In other words, how many thousands of “proponents of the Second Amendment” are out there, who, like Keeter, won’t have their own awakening until they’re staring down the muzzle of a (legally purchased) assault rifle?

And how many more people have to die before that happens?

If you’re a gun fan in need of a wake-up call, there have been plenty of opportunities. Like when 20 little kids were slaughtered in their classrooms in Sandy Hook—that would have been an ideal time to reassess your love affair with semi-automatic weapons. Or if, like Keeter, you’ve been clinging to the idea that good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns, know that multiple mass shootings at military baseshave provided bloody case studies to the contrary.

There have been over 273 mass shootings in 2017, each one inviting every American citizen to weigh our lax gun laws against a body count and ask ourselves: “Are we making a fair trade here?”

Keeter was courageous in standing up to say it’s clear to him now that the trade isn’t fair anymore. If you want to see how many conservatives still do, try posting, “Hey, maybe we should regulate guns” on Facebook and see how quickly and eagerly pro-gun people will jump in and argue with you.

“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

“Guns are irrelevant. This is about mental illness.”

“Bad people will always find a way to get guns.”

Would these people change their minds in the face of a first-hand experience as harrowing as the one Keeter went through? Maybe, but compassion shouldn’t be contingent on personal experience. You shouldn’t have to watch your friends be gunned down in the streets to want to do everything in your power to prevent that from happening.

I can’t help but think of the headline that went viral during the healthcare debate earlier this year, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.”

 So many issues threatening the lives and welfare of Americans right now—healthcare, gun control, racism, police brutality, immigration reform—are being willfully ignored or gleefully rolled back because white men in power can’t fathom what it would be like to be bankrupted by a cancer diagnosis, or fear for their life during a traffic stop, or beripped away from their families.

 Meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck waiting for them to have an epiphany that maybe, just maybe, these issues could affect them directly. I don’t want anyone else to go through what Caleb Keeter went through. I don’t want anyone to lose a child or a parent or a friend to gun violence to realize this is a problem.

Unfortunately, at the rate we’re going, that day might come sooner rather than later.

source

h/t WRSA

“What do you think such a messy civil war in America would look like?  Bubba would be wearing a Ghillie suit, shooting a bolt action rifle, or a modern sporting rifle, and after the shot you will never hear from him again – until the next one.  And you’ll never catch him.  Police will have to decide what side to take, and if they take the wrong one, they will be dealt with in the middle of the night when they take their dogs out to pee in the backyard.

Insurgent will be mixed with progressive statist, and there will be no SEAL teams or nuclear weapons to which you can turn because you won’t know one from another.  There will be nowhere to target a nuclear weapon, and nowhere for a SEAL team to raid.  All of their close quarters battle preparations will be for naught when their own families are in peril due to civil warfare.  These aren’t Afghan tribesmen you’re dealing with.  These are engineers, mechanics, fabricators and welders, chemists, and the world’s best machinists.  If you think Afghanistan was rough, wait to see what civil war would look like in America.

If you have ever said something like, “You can’t win because the government has a land army and nuclear weapons,” here is the moral of the story for you.  You are an idiot.  You haven’t thought through this well enough, and you need to see the second amendment for what it really is.  It is the best guarantor of peace because tyranny is mutually assured destruction.  The statists know that, or else America will suffer the consequences.

However, given the insular life of the metro-riders inside the beltway, I wouldn’t expect anything else out of National Review.  Behind, out of touch, and out of commission.”

http://www.captainsjournal.com/2017/10/09/national-review-on-bump-stocks-and-fourth-generation-warfare/

http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=11724