[FMF DOC]

Worries about the sport's future
But others don’t see it that way, especially many in the hunting community who are concerned that limits on hunting ages are reducing their sport’s numbers and threatening its future.
One group, Families Afield, a coalition of hunting groups that was organized with the specific goal of encouraging youth hunting, notes that since its formation in 2004 some 28 states have changed laws and rules, including lowering hunting ages. “Parents, not politics, should decide an appropriate hunting age for their children,” says the group’s Web site, which stresses hunter education and safety, and advocates no minimum age for young hunters who are supervised by adults.
Families Afield spokesman Rob Sexton said the coalition has no “official position” on minimum ages for unsupervised youth hunting. But the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance, a member group of Families Afield for which Sexton is the vice president of governmental relations, opposed the Washington legislation largely because it considered it “a knee-jerk response to a tragedy,” he said.
“We hate the thought that the law would be changed on an anecdotal situation as opposed to an overall finding that would justify such change,” said Sexton. It’s really parents of minor hunters who must make the call, even when they are older than the law requires, he said. “For instance, my oldest kid is 15 and I don’t have him hunt alone. … He’s just not ready, but I’ve hunted with younger kids who are.”
On its Web site, Families Afield cites numerous statistics and studies to support its position that hunting is not dangerous for properly trained participants. One 2002 study concludes that adult hunters are involved in 10 times as many accidents as all youth hunters, suggesting young hunters are actually statistically safer since they make up 12 percent of the entire hunting population. Adult hunters are blamed for 32 times as many as accidents as young hunters who are supervised, according to the study by the Hunter Incident Clearinghouse.
Tim Lawhern, new president of the International Hunter Education Association and the chief of hunter education in Wisconsin, said more recent statistics are even more favorable to young hunters. In his own state, while young people historically accounted for a third of all hunting accidents, much higher than their proportion of all hunters, that dropped to 13 percent last year and just 7 percent in 2007, he said.
More pressure on parents
The reason? “It’s just not cool to be involved in a hunting accident,” Lawhern said. “More people are paying attention to their kids when they’re out there doing that.”
Lawhern, who plans to focus on recruiting more young hunters in his role as IHEA president, sees no need for the government to set minimum hunting ages, whether kids are alone or supervised. “I think the important thing to remember is it’s the parent’s responsibility until they’re 18,” he said. In states with no minimum ages, “There’s no significant reports of there being a problem with young people hunting. Their incident rates are no different than anywhere else in the country.”
The Washington state case, Lawhern said, is a horrible tragedy but “that’s one incident out of how many millions of hunters around the country? … There are a lot of things we do in life when people are making decisions that could end tragically. … There’s more people injured and killed playing football.”
Kessler of Third Way said gun-rights activists and hunting enthusiasts involved with groups like Families Afield and the National Rifle Association make it unlikely laws to lower hunting ages will pass in Washington or anywhere else.
“It’s a powerful lobby,” he said. For instance, “If you did a poll in Washington or any state, 95 percent would support 16 over 14 (as a minimum solo hunting age). But the people who really care about this are the other 5 percent and that’s the way the gun issue works. They feel it’s affecting their lives, so the intensity of their feeling about this issue is much greater than for other people.”
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The NRA, the nation’s largest and most powerful gun-rights group, also believes parents, not lawmakers, should decide the appropriate age at which their children should begin hunting but did not respond to an msnbc.com inquiry on whether or not it favors a minimum age for unsupervised hunting by kids.
Advocates of minimum age requirements for solo hunters said the rules also protect the young hunters themselves. In the Washington case, said Guzzo of the trails association, the slain hiker and her family are not the only victims. The young hunter, Tyler Kales, “has to live with his judgment error for the rest of his life. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”
Kales’ defense attorney, Howson, agreed. Calling his client an “exceptional” young man who simply made a tragic mistake that likely would have been avoided if an adult had been present, Howson, a former prosecutor, said, “There’s a little bit of blame for all of us in here but it’s all going to come down on this one little kid.”

Thoughts???