I feel the reason that the bow season is so long is to control the amount of deer taken. If we allowed longer gun season the deer population would suffer or be lowered greatly(may not be a bad thing around my area). This my theory. They had a big fight last year to shorten the archery season here by a week and give two weeks to BP. It did pass but a big argument was that it would hurt the deer population(BS). If your really want to hurt a deer population start with a week of gun then let the archers have it for there 8 wks.