Once corrected for the new spike in youth sales brought on by the mentored hunting law that went into effect this year, it looks like a drop in deer tag sales dropped considerably. Last year's gun deer license sales were 642,419 and this year's was 616,812 (once the 9,592 10 and 11 year olds were subtracted that werent available last year) This is a drop of 25,600. That is the largest single year drop since the CWD scare of 2002 which reduced deer tag sales by 70,000. The only other year that showed a larger one year drop took place exactly 30 years ago when deer tag sales dropped by 27,500 from 1978 to 1979.
The opening weekend numbers are
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