Maybe you can speak with the now 12yr old grandson of a co-worker who I have been tutoring in archery since he was 10.....who is so excited to take his hunter safety exam and shoot his bow any chance he gets. The same kid who I have provided with bows , arrows, and my time and knowledge.
Give the kids the right guidance and teaching, helping them learn as they grow and wait their chance to hunt along side us when they are a little more mature mentally to understand what taking a life really is.
If you feel the savior to hunting is throwing a 5 or 7 yr old kid in a box blind with a crossbow or a rifle just so he can kill something to keep his interest away from his Playstation or Spongebob movies, your views on the future of hunting and the role our youth will play is criminally sad.
By the same token you can’t paint all kinds or all scenarios with one broad stroke of the brush. If you think you can then you are criminally st…………….naive. Different kids mature at different ages and some have experienced a great deal more at an early age than others have that may have readied them for such an experience. Myself as well as most of my friends starting tagging along consistently with our fathers when we were no more than three years old. By the time I was 7 I killed my first limit of teal with a shotgun. I was a big kid and I was far far ahead of the other children in my close both physically and mentally. I spent most of my time with the adults and that’s where I wanted to spend my time. My dad and his friends hunted hard and looked up to them and wanted to be like them and I spent most of my time trying to be like them from the time I was very little. As soon as I was big enough my father quit shooting but we still hunted just as much as before. The difference was that now he spent all of his time working with me on safety and ethics and coaching my shooting. Different kids develop at different ages and first of all you aren’t qualified to decide an age at which all children are prepared to hunt and second of all it’s not your place to.
Nowadays it seems that compound technology is so advanced that a great deal (if not the majority) of bowhunters who claim they "bowhunt for the challenge" have turned to strictly harvesting trophy bucks to up the challenge and encouraging everyone else to do the same.
What would crossbows do for that mentality? Anything smaller than 180" of antler should be hid in the trunk of your car for fear of shame (unless it's your first buck of course) and ridicule from the mighty trophy hunters?
You are forgetting about one of the most important factors in that phenonmenon. That is the deer population explosion of the last 20 years. It's not a result of the advances in equipmenbt it's a result of the fact that there is a deer behind every other tree in all most every part of the country. Obviously, there are a few exceptions and I am sure that attitude is not as prevelant in those areas. For the rest of us, it's much easier to kill deer these days than it was 20 years ago simply because there are so many more of them.
It took almost 2 years of practice with that kid I'm teaching to have him really start to get a good repeatable anchor, follow through, grip, ect ect.........and he's proud of his accomplishment in shooting his 3 to 5" groups at 20 yards now. You should see him jump up and down when he hits 2 arrows together, and the fun he gets trying to shoot accurately at 30 yards.
I worked in a shop long enough to see some guys that could come in having never shot before and just had amazingly repeatable form. I set a guy up one night that was shooting for the first time ever (2 days before season). I am telling him it's tough shooting a bow and you won't be ready to hunt in 2 days yadda yadda yadda and this guy shoots about 20 minutes and gets 3 robinhoods at 20 yards and is consistently shooting quarter size groups. Now he was the best I eve saw out of the gate but I have seen SEVERAL people get setup and be shooting very impressively in a matter of minutes.