ORIGINAL: stealthycat II
here is my thoughts on this ............ it was so important to ticket a man for hunting over bait for turkeys on private land that a shooting death occurred as the result ..... I mean, seriously, in retrospect, is the importance of it all really justification for the events that unfolded?
sure, many things could have stopped the escalations of the story that was told, and it IS a story, no one knows what happened but the dead man and the living one, and the living one is telling it - but in the grand scheme of things the root cause was the drive to write a citation to a man on his own property for hunting turkeys over bait - right?
is it me or does that sound like a reallytrvial start to it all ?
Maybe we should just chuck the game laws entirely and let people shoot what they want, when they want, how many they want, and not worry about it. Or maybe we should just afford that luxury to people who have their own land and let us public land hunters have to deal with rules and regulations. The guy might have been on his own land, but laws are laws. If a LEO asked me to climb down and put down my weapon, I'd do it. I might not be happy if I was legally hunting, but I'd do it. The last thing on earth I'd do is threaten him or point my weapon at him. Yes, it was trivial. The LEO followed up on a game violation tip, caught the guy red handed, and the guy should have just taken the citation and been done with it. I can't imagine the LEO was lookin to shoot someone that day. I have to think the land owner took a trivial situation and escallated it.