7/09/2006

Do hunter safety classes matter?

These changes back and forth would provide a nice empirical test for whether these hunting education classes actually improve hunter safety. I haven't looked at the data, but my guess is that they don't matter with respect to safety, though they will probably affect the number of hunters.

New hunters in Massachusetts will have to complete a hunter education course before heading for the woods, under a bill signed into law yesterday by Gov. Mittt Romney. . . .

Prior to the 1998 gun control law, in order to get a hunting license a person would either have to have carried a license prior to Jan. 1, 1997, or have taken a 15-hour hunter education course administered by the state division of Fisheries and Wildlife.

The 1998 law, according to Wallace, was "poorly written" to allow anyone who carried a firearms license or a firearms identification card to go hunting without a hunter education course. . . . .

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You might check in to Colorado Division of Wildlife records. I know they had kept track of pre- and post-class requirement safety incidents for each season.

They should have about 30-odd years of data for you to play with, along with some good contact for similar data in other states.

From what I recall, there was a demonstrable decline in both fatal and non-fatal accidents related to firearms.

7/09/2006 11:01 AM  

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