Well by firearms law, it is a pistol. Some states further define handguns for hunting as being "straight walled handgun cartridges" to eliminate the use of rifle cartridges in handguns. I took the following the quote off the Michigan DNR site.

A conventional (smokeless powder) handgun must be .35 caliber or larger and loaded with straight-walled cartridges and may be single- or multiple-shot but cannot exceed a maximum capacity of nine rounds in the barrel and magazine combined.

So your 30-30 is ILLEGAL to use in the shotgun zone. A straight walled pistol case is just that, a straight case, no neck to it. So the .357, .41, .44, and .45 LC all fit into that category.

Sorry about your luck.