Newshound Recent PostsCategories
Archives
|
November 25, 2008
by Now that things have
calmed down—relatively speaking, of course—on the national political scene
since the November 4 elections, sportsmen may not be paying as close attention
to the goings-on in Washington, D.C. as they were earlier in the year.
However, a strategic move
that unseated a longtime sportsmen’s advocate from a powerful House committee
leadership position last week could have far-reaching ramifications in the
approaching legislative session.
By a slim margin of
137-122 last Thursday, House Democrats voted to buck seniority and strip the
longest-serving member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Michigan’s John
Dingell, of the chairmanship of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.
In his place will be Rep.
Henry Waxman, whose constituents include residents of Beverly Hills, Malibu and
Santa Monica, Calif.
Why was this move
significant for hunters and anglers, you ask?
Waxman has a long history
of supporting extreme environmental issues, animal rights causes and anti-gun
legislation. He is a darling of the nation’s most vociferous anti-hunting
organization, the Humane Society of the United States. Hunter-advocacy groups
fear that in his influential position, Waxman may be poised to utilize the federal Endangered
Species Act to curtail current scientific wildlife management practices by linking certain species and habitats to the wider issue of global climate change.
On the other hand, Rep. Dingell has been a tireless champion of sportsmen
issues for decades. His namesake Dingell-Johnson Act, also known as the
Sportfishing Restoration Act, annually provides millions of dollars to states
for fisheries, boat ramps and fishing access.
“Rep. Dingell
understood and cared about sportsmen and their devotion to conservation,” said
Rob Sexton, Vice President of Government Affairs of the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance. “(Waxman) has voted for nearly all anti-firearm bills in Congress going
back to the so-called ‘Assault Weapon Ban’ and the ‘Brady Bill.’ Both of
those bills were punitive and designed to prohibit law abiding citizens from
engaging in their constitutional rights.”
[ Read Full Post ]November 25, 2008
by "Some people ask
why men go hunting. They must be the kind of people who seldom get far from
highways. What do they know of the tryst a hunting man keeps with the wind and
the trees and the sky? Hunting? The means are greater than the end, and every
hunter knows it."
-Gordon MacQuarrie
Field & Stream, 1939
[ Read Full Post ]November 19, 2008
by A lobbyist and former
Maryland state lawmaker who was attacked and repeatedly gored by a whitetail
buck as he walked his Labrador retriever last week is recovering from multiple
puncture wounds inflicted in the melee.
Gilbert Genn, a former
state delegate from Montgomery County, said when the deer appeared on the front
lawn of his Gaithersburg home, his chocolate Lab, Yuffie, ran to chase it off,
but the buck didn’t budge.
“It came right at me, from
about 10 feet away. I tried to run at an angle, but it caught me flush in the
back right leg, impaled me with its weight, knocked me to the ground. It
started to come right at my face with its antlers,” Genn told Washington, DC’s
WTOP radio.
The attacking buck rammed
the former delegate three times, inflicting wounds to his leg, chest and groin.
Recovering from the attack
after treatment in a local hospital emergency room, the lobbyist, who served as
a Democrat in Maryland’s House of Representatives from 1987 until 1999, joked
that the deer’s actions were possibly motivated by its political party
affiliation.
“Not to get
too partisan, but I’m convinced it was a Republican deer, because it happened
right where we had our Obama sign,” said Genn. “And all the deer could do was
attack, attack, attack. So it had to be a Republican deer.”
Some
politicians just don’t know when to quit, do they?
[ Read Full Post ]November 17, 2008
by Gun owners and Second Amendment-rights watchers: here’s a great idea that we’d love to see catch on with state lawmakers across the country.
As a result of legislation passed this summer, South Carolina will have its first-ever Second Amendment Sales Tax Holiday on the two days after Thanksgiving this year.
The Palmetto State’s
48-hour reprieve from imposing its 6-percent state sales tax on firearms will begin at 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 28 and continue through 11:59 p.m. Nov. 29. The Second Amendment Sales Tax Holiday will apply to the purchase of “fixed-cartridge handguns, shotguns and rifles.”
So-called sales tax holiday bills are nothing new for state legislatures. In 2008, a total of 13
states either reduced or eliminated sales tax on the purchase of back-to-school clothing and supplies during the final weeks of August.
But South Carolina
proudly stands alone with its ambitious 2-day removal of the state’s sales tax on guns.
And it didn’t come
easily, either.
In fact,the South Carolina House and Senate had to override Republican Gov. Mark
Sanford’s initial veto of S1143 to finally pass the “Second Amendment Recognition Act” in late June.
The bill was introduced by State Representative Mike Pitts, a pro-gun stalwart and recipient of the
NRA’s Rick Daniel Memorial Defender of Freedom Award.
Supporters hope the tax break will translate into increased sales for gun shops and sporting goods stores, coming as it does during what are traditionally two of the biggest shopping days of the calendar year.
The South Carolina Department of Revenue clarified that sales of items such as ammunition, black powder, holsters, archery supplies, antique guns and collectible guns will continue have state sales tax applied during the two-day period. In addition, the South Carolina tax holiday does not affect federal excise tax, which is imposed on all firearms and ammunition under the Pittman-Robertson Act.
November 13, 2008
by With the opening of firearms deer season this weekend, the Indiana State Police is warning hunters to avoid touching and moving items they find in the woods that may be
associated with clandestine methamphetamine production.
It’s an unfortunate and disturbing sign of the times in middle America.
Across portions of the nation’s heartland, illegal use of the highly addictive substance—and its production—is considered epidemic.
In one Hoosier county alone, Noble, authorities have reportedly seized 62 meth labs so far in 2008—up from 34 last year and 24 the year before.
Indiana State Police Trooper Rob Smith told the Ft. Wayne Journal-Gazette this week that meth production used to be a somewhat complicated endeavor that required the highly toxic farming fertilizer anhydrous ammonia, which often was stolen from farm supply stores.
But beginning earlier this year, the trooper said a change started taking place, and more illegal cooking operators switched to what he called the “one-pot method,” which produces smaller quantities of the drug but doesn’t create the telltale fumes or require anhydrous ammonia.
Trooper Smith told the Ft.Wayne paper that not only has the method led to an increase in production in urban areas, but it also makes it easier for producers to dump their garbage in the woods or on a roadside. Police recently arrested a man who had a one-pot lab in his backpack, he said.
In a joint statement issued this week, the Indiana State Police and Department of Natural Resources offered the following advice for the estimated 250,000 Indianans heading out for deer hunting this weekend, as the firearms season opens November 15:
-Methamphetamine “cooks” use a variety of containers to manufacture the drug, and small gas cans are popular. Don’t pick up a discarded gas can, even if it looks new.
-Other trash that could indicate a meth lab: Battery casings, clear plastic bags, empty blister packs and containers such as pop bottles and jars.
-Be careful of any discarded cylinder with a modified valve; it could have contained the volatile chemical anhydrous ammonia.
[ Read Full Post ]November 11, 2008
by After tracking a whitetail doe one of them shot yesterday
morning, two hunters in northeastern Minnesota were not the first to find the
expired deer.
Ted
Kline and hunting partner Ron Smith waited for a few minutes before heading out
to retrieve the deer on Kline’s property along the Artichoke River, about 25
miles northwest of Duluth. When they found the deer, they were surprised to
discover a pair of mountain lions tearing flesh from the carcass.
“When we got there they had both been eating on it. We
scared them off, but they kept circling us. They didn’t want to leave,” Kline
told the Duluth News-Tribune.
Kline says he has no doubt the animals were puma
concolor. He said they had long tails, were
about three feet in length and definitely were not bobcats, wolves or coyotes.
The hunters said they phoned a third friend for assistance
so that two men could drag the deer while a third could watch for the mountain
lions, with a ready rifle, just in case.
“The chunks they tore off that doe were huge. The claw
marks were huge,” Kline told the newspaper.
He estimated the cougars ate about a third of the deer
meat in the time span between shooting and recovery, around 30 minutes.
Cougar sightings are not uncommon in far-northern
Minnesota, though it is quite unusual to see two lions together in any natural
setting, as they are mostly solitary hunters.
John Erb, a forest wildlife biologist for the Minnesota
Department of Natural Resources, said his department receives about 200 reports
of cougar sightings each year, but confirmations—from photos, tracks or
scat—are uncommon.
“We
had two confirmed last year, including one near Floodwood…but they are very,
very rare,” Erb told the News-Tribune. “And for there to be two cougars
together in one spot, that would be the first time in Minnesota probably in 75
years.”
[ Read Full Post ]November 10, 2008
by Aren’t today’s modern
digital trail cameras great? Other than their obvious use for identifying game
and other animals in the field, we’ve heard of them being used for things like
verifying the existence of mountain lions in Louisiana and Missouri and for
fingering burglars and other nefarious characters.
 But this is the first
time we’ve heard of a trailcam being used to provide evidence for charges in a
hunter harassment case.
The Northwest Florida
Daily News reports today that an unnamed Bay County man has been charged with
hunter harassment and trespassing after a strategically placed trailcam captured digital images of him spraying his
neighbor’s deer feeder with a substance that turned out to be animal repellant.
Can you
say ‘caught in the act?’
The owner of the feeder
had complained to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers
that he suspected someone was interfering with his bait site because deer had
stopped coming in to feed. So he placed a motion-activated camera at the
location and, sure enough, snapped a shot of his no-good neighbor, with spray
bottle in hand.
A
conservation officer investigating the case said that when confronted with the
photo evidence, the neighbor admitted spraying the area with animal
repellant.
[ Read Full Post ]November 3, 2008
by
An Escambia
County, Fla. boater stopped by a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation
Commission officer for a routine safety equipment inspection found himself
in an awkward parental predicament this past weekend.
Asked by the
officer if he’d been fishing, the unnamed boater replied that he had not;
instead he was just trying out a new watercraft he had recently purchased.
When the officer asked if he
could look in the man’s cooler, the boater’s tale took a sharp twist, according
to a story in the Northwest Florida News.
“Oh, I was just kidding.
Here are four red snapper,” the man allegedly told the officer, explaining that he and
his accompanying daughter had each caught their two-fish limit.
That’s when
the man’s 7-year-old little girl—who obviously knew the difference between
right and wrong—chimed in.
“Daddy lied,”
she politely informed the officer.
The newspaper
reports that the man was subsequently cited for two fish over the limit.
Here
at the Newshound, we can only assume that instead of having fish for dinner
that night, Daddy dined on an adult portion of crow.
[ Read Full Post ]
|
