Can you prove this will happen? Based on what?

I grew up in Ohio, my brothers, nephews, sisters, aunts, uncles...etc still live there. They own land from an acre to over 200 acres. Ohio has never had antler restrictions. When I killed my first deer in 1976 the total take statewide was around 30,000 deer. Now its almost 10 times that.

With themultiple bucktags and long gun season in NY, you will see a minimal increase in bigger bucks, even with AR. I have lived here for 12 years, I know how the majority of the people feel about killing a deer around here, and most want to shoot bucks, includingsome of my close friends and coworkers. I dont care what you use for AR's, if you allow people to gun hunt for over 3 weeks, eventually you will get snow, and the deer will get slaughtered, regardless of size. With AR's, They will just kill a whole bunch of little 6 and 8 pointers instead some spikes and forks. What did you gain? You can see the stats in NY(southern tier), years with ample snow, deer kill goes up, no snow, down. Its the same in Ohio. All you hear around here, "Man, we need some snow so we can kill a deer", the DEC will tell you the same thing.

I don't think ARs are the answer because its one more layer of red tape and sublegal deer will be left in the woods to rot because someone thought they saw "3" points.

Ohio got to where they are at by issuing "deer tags" . In some counties you could kill either sex, but only one deer. With a 1 week season (some counties were as low as 3 days) many hunters killed the first deer they could, very often a doe. Some people waited for a buck(spike, 6 pt, 180 class B&C), but no matter what, you could only kill one buck during the season, bow, gun, or muzzleloader.

With a generous bow season in Ohio, the gun season isn't all that important, in fact I know guys who don't even hunt the gun season!

If you tried to cut the southern tier season in NY, people would flip out, including many sporting goods stores and other businesses that depend on hunters. The only wayto help, statewide, is for the DEC to allow only 1 buck per season, andantlerless tags as needed. I think younger or inexperienced hunters should be allowed to kill any size buck they have the chance to(it they want to kill a buck), most will learn to become more patient over time. Just don't give the the chance to kill 2 or 3 small bucks during the season.

JMO