First ask yourself this; why do we have primitive weapons seasons?
So what is the purpose of a particular season like muzzleloader or bow season?
To me those seasons exist to promote the use of a particular weapon so that the skills associated with it will not fade from our collective consciousness.
Now comes crossbows being dumped into bow season. Anytime you give people an easier option they will take it. Oh sure there won't be much of an immediate effect because all the older hands like myself who already have bows and know how to shoot them aren't likely to undergo the unnecessary added expense of buying a crossbow and decking it out with everything needed to make it woods ready when we already have a bow.
In Alabama you don't have a primitive weapons season or a bow season. You have
archery, muzzle loading and general gun season. Since your season is an
archery season and not a primitive weapons season or a bow season, you should have absolutely no objection what so ever to crossbows being used during this archery season.
As I already stated Alabama does not have a bow season but even if Alabama called it bow season a crossbow is in fact a "bow". If they called it a primitive weapons season you loose this argument as well because crossbows have been around since about 600B.C. which is about 2500 years before the compound bow.
Crossbows are archery equipment no matter how you want to argue it and they are far more primitive than compound bows.
But what about the young kids? All they want here in Alabama now is a crossbow. Why? Simple, it's easier. Why learn to shoot a bow with proper form; worry about learning to tuning a bow; fuss with over or under spined arrows; get busted trying to draw on a deer under your tree; be handicapped by a short draw length; etc, etc. Just get a crossbow. Minutes to master with no effort on your part and bow season is all yours.
And you know this how? Are you overseeing all of the archery sales in Alabama? How many 8 - 10 year old kids can pull back the legal minimum of 35 pounds? Should they not be allowed to hunt during the
archeryseason? Why should a kid that can't muster the strength to pull 35 pounds on a compound bow not be allowed the opportunity to deer hunt? Are you that selfish to deny children the opportunity to enjoy hunting with their fathers?
It's the same dumbing down of America you see across the board. Don't demand that our kids study harder to get the national grade average up, just make the tests easier. That will get the scores up too. End result is the same right? LOL! God help us.
Wow, that statement is so ridiculously absurd that there are no appropriate words.
Perhaps, because they were able to legally hunt with a crossbow at an earlier age, the kids that got out there at that younger age became that much more proficient in their hunting, tracking, shot placement, and general woodsman skills and hunting ethics than the children that were required to wait 2-4 more years. How exactly is it a bad thing to get a child hunting and learning the woods at a younger age than he or she would have been able to with out a crossbow?
And in that same vein lets discuss what was at the root of the crossbow push in this country. MONEY!!! Ding! Ding! Ding!
There was no grass roots crossbow movement. No crowd of people clamoring for crossbows. Handicapped people could already use them. This will not get anyone into hunting that wasn't at least already gun hunting. It wasn't for the children. This was a push purely by crossbow companies and associated businesses that stand to profit from the inclusion of crossbows in bow season. Crossbow companies dream of selling one to every gun hunter in America and outfitters dream of being able to sell archery season hunts to thousands of gun hunters that heretofore could not master a bow. So they bribed state game commissions to open the door for them to make big profits. End of list.
Heaven forbid a company make a profit and at the same time introduce people to the sport of hunting. Do you honestly believe that the same wan't true of compounds "back in the day"?
If national crossbow advocates, and I've never met one that didn't stand to profit off them somehow, want a season then give them a separate one. But don't take the season that others have fought so hard for.
I didn't realize that the crossbow advocates and states game management comissions have excluded you and other non crossbow hunters from hunting in the hard faught archery seasons across the country.