millerhunter13

i think what some one wants to hunt with is there choice, hunting is hard period, it takes time, effort, and patience, even rifle hunting at 300 yards, takes work, it might be easier then bow hunting, but its is still hard. you have to know how your gun shoots, you have to have proper form to shoot a rifle at that distance, everyone has a personal preference, if you can hunt with a crossbow and your state allows it, awsome, i wouldnt mind having a crossbow, but our state makes you have a special disabled permit to hunt with them. I wouldnt mind hunting with a recurve or longbow, but i dont have the time to put into it, because i am busy with school and other things, so i shoot a compound, so what ever someone wants to hunt with is there choice, that is why there are hunderds of different, bows, guns, arrows, calibers, stands, its all what someone wants.

Schultzy

You answered my question, thank you.

ranger56528

Here is a question for the no sayers to crossbow....(let say CB's are legal in all states)
If you hunted say 24 yrs with recurve,longbow or compound and you love it to no avail but you dislike crossbows and tell everyone you would never use one,ever,so you go to work one day have a accident and are hospitalized,you get out and will never be able to draw a bow again do to the injury.......You have too remember that bow hunting was your life....So now what do you do,your only 39yrs old........
Would you give up Bow hunting for the rest of your life or would you p/u a crossbow so you could still hunt with a bow for the nxt 40 yrs or so......
(this has nothing to do with guns because they are illegal in this ?thanks to the far leftgov).

Its a easy YES or NO question....no if and or buts just aYES or NO....

Matt / PA

I would ABSOLUTELY hunt with a crossbow, already stated that because even though it's NOT A BOW I'm also not blind enough to see it's the next best thing if you can't physically pull a bow back.
I will never ever begrudge someone wanting to hunt the archery season with a crossbow due to a physical limitation.
It's the closest thing to archery hunting you'll get without using a bow so go nuts.

Arthur P

I hate sticking my nose back into this cesspool, but I do have a comment...

Take the prod off a crossbow and what have you got? A BOW. A very short, very powerful bow, but it IS a bow. I think someone said it earlier; a crossbow is a bow-plus. Just like a compound is a bow-plus... plus cams, axles, cables...

Matt / PA

Arthur,
If you can pull it back and hold it long enough to shoot it...........

Here's the thing
I can hold my 61# recurve back for just about 25 seconds and still make an accurate shot.
I can Hold my compound back at absolute top end for about 90 seconds with my arm extended, probably a little longer if I wanted to find a way to rest my bow arm.
You can hold a crossbow back for an entire 12hr day in stand and never have to pull it back.

The percentage of time you can keep each at the ready to shoot shows pretty plainly which are BOWS and which are not. I know history yadda yadda yadda.........but if in your head (which it is in mine) you need to pull it back when you want to shoot it, HOLD it back in order to aim as the definition of a BOW then a crossbow will never be a bow in my eyes.
Its not evil,they're actually pretty darn cool, and I would absolutely hunt with one if I had to but to me it will never be a bow in the spirit of what I consider a bow to be and if I was using one I would never feel like I was BOWhunting.

Arthur P

You can't, or at least aren't supposed to, leave any crossbow cocked and locked for more than several hours at a time. With steel prod crossbows like Wyvern's and mine, you have to relax the limbs every couple of hours or risk the limbs taking a set and losing power. So you won't find any knowledgeable crossbow hunters sitting with a cocked and loaded crossbow for a solid 12 hours.

I don't deny that there is a definite difference between having the crossbow pre-drawn and having to draw in the immediate presence of game.I define immediate presence as the animal is offering the shot and you draw, aim and shoot, right then. Even drawing and holding as little as 90 seconds with a compound while waiting for the perfect shot does not qualify as immediate presence, in my book though. Anyway, it's advantage to the crossbow there, and nobody will deny it.

But you also have to consider thatcrossbows have the disadvantage of being a helluva lot noisier, even louder than the loudest compound. The noise is more likely to make a deer jump the string than with a conventional bow. Advantage and disadvantage. It works out as a wash.

I wish we lived closer together so we could go out and fling some arrows, and I'd let you have some trigger time on my midieval crossbow if you wanted. Let you see if it's really as much of a game killing machine as you imagine.(Don't forget, you represent a company that manufactures a crossbow. A very high ticket crossbow at that. [:-])

Matt / PA

Oh I know.......and I'm sure I would see the difference in SPIRIT of your crossbow vs mine that will shoot 405fps and 155ft lbs of KE.
You let yours in the general archery season...........you also let in mine.

I can't tell you how many times I've drawn the bow at the wrong time, had to let down, redraw, never get drawn, can't draw because of a weird angle, have deer right under me before I even hear them on rainy or windy days, or just blow the shot because I'm shaking or can't see through the peep sight, or a miriad of other things that would be a moot point if I had a 175# scoped crossbow sitting across my lap.

I said it before I would have the 3 biggest deer I've ever seen in my life on my wall right now if I was using any decent modern crossbow VS a compound.

A compound is an advantage over traditional gear for sheer consistent precision no doubt about it, and it takes less time to become proficient ENOUGH........however the advantage of a modern crossbow VS the compound is FAR greater than the advantage of a compound vs trad gear. IN my eyes the advantage is about the same scale as how long you can hold them back.
A little, vs a little longer, vs a long long time.

2 bows you have to tune, fit, learn how to shoot, draw, hold and release.............regardless of materials or function.......vs a crossbow which you simply cock, load, and sight in. then set it across your lap and wait to do everything you would do with a rifle but at shorter distances.

Schultzy

No! I'd figure out something to make it work. I'm very stubborn Ranger and I always stick to my word, nothing against you in how you hunt! If someone else prefers it when disabled, thats entirely up to that person and whatever makes them happy.

Arthur P

Consider, Matt... We're already letting in compounds with 99% let-off. How long could you hold back a 70 pound draw bow with 7/10ths of a pound of holding weight? In Texas, the drawlock device is legal! Isn't that a vertical crossbow, for all practical purposes? We've got bows that are nudging ever closer to 400 fps, and you know as well as I that they're going to keep pushing until they get there. Some suicidesetups are already capable of it.

Maybe I'm ready to toss out the baby with the bath water. I've been accused of it before. I spent a lot of years on the front lines of the anti-crossbow war, whileoften taking very long breaks from the compound. I'dconcentrate on shooting traditionalwhile notpaying much attention to what was going on with compounds. Then one day, duringone of mytraditional sabbaticals that had been going on for several years, someone said something on a forum that caused me to turn around and take a hard look at what was going on behind my back with compound technology.

I honestly felt betrayed because I saw that what I was fighting for had turned into exactly what I had been fighting so hard against. All the things I'd feared would happen if crossbows were allowed in archery seasons had already come to pass. There were suddenly a lot more of what I considered slob hunters in our ranks than ever before. We had guys describing themselves as meat hunters and trophy hunters.Wehad equipmentthat makes bowhunting so easy that BOWHUNTERSstarted doing QDM. That had always beforebeen the rifle hunters' domain! Bowhunting success rates for compound users had leapt up to around 35%, only acouple tenths of a percent different from what Ohio lists as the success rate for crossbow hunters. Traditional? It still is only in the 12-15% range. We had bowhunters that were getting upset if they didn't tag out every year. BOWHUNTERS consistently tagging out!

I don't know. Time will tell if I'm right or wrong. All I know is, except for traditional and primitive,bowhunting today is not the bowhunting I was fighting to preserve.I just don't see the vast majority of 'bowhunters' backing off from their infatuation with technology enough to reestablish what they always called "a clear and demonstrable difference" between compounds and crossbows. On the contrary, the compound clankeeps demanding more and more. "Make it faster, easier, more mechanicalso I canbe successful without so much effort."

The reason so many states lately have legalized crossbows is due almost entirely to the proliferation in compound technology, not to mentionP&Y's loss of credibility on the issue since the demise of the 65% let-off rule. You can look forward to more states going the same way in the near future. The geniehas escapedand there's no way to put that little turd back in the bottle.