Children in the Crosshairs: The Hunting Industry, Wildlife
Agencies, and Children Hunting Children
5/9/00, The Fund for Animals
Published by The Fund for Animals, May 2000
Authored by Norm Phelps based upon research by Peter Petersan, Haley
Smith, and the author.
"'That was my deer rifle, and it was set deadly accurate . .
. At 200 yards, if that crosshair was on it, you pull that
trigger . . . ' The grandfather's voice trailed off."
Allen G. Breed, The Associated Press, reporting the words
of Arkansas wildlife conservation officer Doug Golden after
his grandson had taken part in the killing of four children
and a teacher. The Bergen Record Online, March 26, 1998
A HUNTING STORY
Mitch pulled off on the side of the road, climbed out of the van, and
headed into the woods wearing his camouflage shirt and pants, the kind
deer hunters wear to break the outline of the human form so the gaze
of their prey will slide over them. Slung carefully under his arm with the
barrel pointed toward the ground was a .44 Ruger deer rifle. Walking
quietly, he glanced up at the sun flickering through the trees; it was
midday, later than most hunters go in, but Mitch knew what he was
doing. Like all good hunters, he and his buddy had scouted the area.
They knew where the game would be, and they had found the perfect
spot to set up, a wooded hill overlooking a clearing. Deer and people
rarely notice things higher than eye level.
Mitch had just settled in when he heard a rustling in the dead leaves
and saw his friend Drew slipping up beside him. Although younger,
Drew was the experienced hunter, starting when he was six with a BB
gun that he used to hunt small birds; last year, he had graduated to a
shotgun and bagged his first duck; ever since, he had been looking
forward to his first deer. A deer is a rite of passage for a young hunter.
In the hunting culture of rural America, when you drop your first deer,
you're no longer a child playing at hunting; you're a man.
Mitch handed Drew the camouflage jacket and the Remington .30-06
deer rifle with a telescopic sight that he had brought for his friend, and
the two young hunters turned to survey the killing field, an open, grassy
area about a hundred yards down the hill. Easy range, especially for
the Remington with the scope sight. But no problem for the Ruger
either. Drew had been taught to shoot and to hunt by his father and his
grandfather, enthusiastic hunters and firearms collectors. His father
had also introduced Drew to a sport called Practical Pistol Shooting, in
which the participant walks through a course and shoots at pop-up
targets. The goal is speed and accuracy. Drew had neither. But the
lesson of hunting is that the right firearm and the right tactics eliminate
the need for skill. By choosing his weapon carefully and showing a little
ingenuity and patience, anybody able to hold and fire a rifle can kill.
The rifle overcomes its operator's deficiencies; there are paraplegic
hunters, one-armed hunters, even blind hunters, and with the right
weapon, they can all bag their prey. As Drew's grandfather, a state
wildlife conservation officer, said of the gun Drew had chosen, "With a
rifle with that kind of scope on it, you don't have to have much talent at
shooting. You just aim and pull the trigger."
Mitchell Johnson, age thirteen, and Andrew Golden, eleven, settled in
and surveyed the grassy clearing below them. At the far edge stood a
one-story brick building, Westside Middle School in Jonesboro,
Arkansas, where both were students. The schoolyard was filled with
their classmates and teachers milling around waiting for the all-clear to
sound after a fire alarm. Just as hunters use calls to attract ducks,
geese, and turkeys, and "rattles" to attract deer, Drew had set off the
alarm to draw his prey to the killing ground. Now, he and Mitch glanced
at one another, picked their targets, and began firing. When they were
finished, four school children and a teacher were dead and eleven more
children were wounded.1
CHILDREN KILLING CHILDREN
For decades, defenders of hunting smugly assured the American public
that children killing children was an urban plague against which small
towns and rural areas were inoculated by their culture of sport hunting.
Hunting, they told us, taught young people to respect firearms and to
respect life, practically guaranteeing that they would never turn a gun on
a human being. Exactly how killing taught respect for life, they never
quite explained; it was an article of faith, and anyone who questioned it
was dismissed as someone who didn't understand the rural values that
had made America great.
Events of the last six years have shown how tragically misguided that
notion is. Children raised in a hunting culture, sometimes wearing
hunting garb and employing hunting tactics, like Mitchell Johnson and
Andrew Golden, have been killing other children with hunting weapons at
a stunning rate. They have shown beyond any reasonable argument
that the moral and psychological distance between killing a defenseless
animal and killing a defenseless human being is a lot shorter than
hunters would like us to believe.
May 26, 1994, Union, Kentucky: High school senior Clay Shrout
shoots his parents and two sisters and takes a class hostage.
Like Andrew Golden, Shrout has a history of shooting birds with a
BB gun.2
November 15, 1995, Lynnville, Tennessee: High school senior
Jamie Rouse kills a teacher and a student and wounds another
student with a rifle.3
February 2, 1996, Moses Lake, Washington: Fourteen-year-old
Barry Loukaitis kills two classmates and a teacher and wounds
another classmate with a .30-30 deer rifle.4
July, 1996, Moses Lake, Washington: a fourteen-year-old boy
breaks into a house and holds the homeowner hostage with a
hunting rifle.5
December, 1996, Moses Lake, Washington: a fourteen-year-old
boy uses a hunting rifle to kill his mother and stepsister before
turning the weapon on himself.6
February 19, 1997, Bethel, Alaska: Evan Ramsey, age sixteen,
kills his high school principal and a fellow student with a
twelve-gauge shotgun.7
October 1, 1997, Pearl, Mississippi: After killing his mother, Luke
Woodham, 17, takes a .30-30 hunting rifle to school and shoots
two female students, killing them both.8
December 1, 1997, West Paducah, Kentucky: High school
student Michael Carneal kills three members of a school prayer
group and wounds five others. The murder weapon is a pistol,
but Carneal is also carrying two shotguns and two hunting rifles
at the time of the murders.9
December 15, 1997, Stamps, Arkansas: Todd Colt, age
fourteen, wounds two of his fellow students with his father's
rifle.10
March 24, 1998, Jonesboro, Arkansas: Mitchell Johnson, eleven,
and Andrew Golden, thirteen, kill four students and a teacher
and wound eleven others, six seriously, with deer hunting rifles.
Golden is an avid hunter who was taught the sport by his father
and grandfather, the latter a wildlife conservation officer with the
Arkansas Division of Fish and Game.11
May 19, 1998, Fayetteville, Tennessee: A high school senior kills
a classmate.12
May 21, 1998, Springfield, Oregon: Kipland Kinkel uses a .22
caliber hunting rifle to kill his father and mother, then drives to
Thurston High School, where he shoots 26 of his fellow students,
killing two.13
May 20, 1999, Conyers, Georgia: Fifteen-year-old T. J. Solomon
wounds six students with a hunting rifle taken from the collection
of his stepfather, an avid hunter who keeps more than a dozen
hunting rifles in his gun cabinet.14
The list is mind-numbing: Fourteen shooting incidents in six years, 27
people murdered and 50 wounded by children and teenagers living in
communities where hunting is a way of life. Many came from hunting
families, and nearly all killed human beings with weapons kept for
killing animals. No one can any longer claim that hunting teaches
children respect for life. In fact, we now have to ask the opposite
question: Does hunting teach children that life is cheap and that
shooting those who cannot protect themselves is the way of "real men"?
YOUR GOVERNMENT IN ACTION: TEACHING
CHILDREN TO KILL
Apparently oblivious to this mounting epidemic of children from hunting
communities killing other children with hunting weapons, the sport
hunting industry, including state wildlife agencies, and the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service (FWS), are mounting a massive, nationwide campaign
to recruit children into hunting. Consider these examples:
The Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission sponsors special
hunts on public land for children as young as eight years old. Fourteen
states, including Arkansas, Ohio, New Mexico, and Maryland have
children's hunts with no minimum age limit. All told, a survey of state
wildlife agencies conducted by The Fund for Animals reveals that in
1999, 48 states sponsored children's hunts.
A growing number of states now offer cut-rate hunting licenses to
children under a certain age, usually sixteen. Colorado's "Youth
Combination Small Game Hunting, Furbearer, and Fishing License" costs
just one dollar, as opposed to $15 for an adult license. In an attractive
brochure, the Colorado Division of Wildlife announces in boldface type
that for this Youth License, "There is no minimum age. (For example, an
eight-year-old with a Hunter Safety/Education card can buy one of these
licenses.)"15 Not to be outdone, New Jersey offers resident and
non-resident children ages ten through thirteen a hunting license for
three dollars, as opposed to $22 for a resident adult license or $100
for non-residents.16 Apparently deciding to play it safe and get their
money up front, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries
offers for $250 a Junior Lifetime Hunting License to children under
twelve. As with Colorado, there is no minimum age; the child must
simply have passed the state's hunter education class.17
But even this is only a small part of the picture. In public schools, in
state and national forests, even on federal lands designated as wildlife
"refuges," children all across America are being recruited into
recreational hunting by a politically powerful coalition that includes the
hunting industry, state wildlife agencies, and agencies of the federal
government. Funded by a combination of public and industry money,
these initiatives are part of a campaign whose strategy has been being
mapped out by academics at prestigious universities and in private
think tanks.
This massive effort to recruit children into recreational hunting is
justified to the public with noble sounding phrases like "responsible
wildlife management," "preserving American traditions," and "passing
on family values." But there is another factor that is seldom
mentioned---money.
HUNTING FOR BIG BUCKS
Killing animals for pleasure is big business. Very big business. The
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an agency of the Department of the
Interior, reports that in 1996, the last year for which statistics are
available, hunters spent $20.67 billion on their sport.18 Despite a
decline in the number of hunters during the same period, this is up
from $14 billion in 1991, apparently due to an increase in big game
hunting, which is far more expensive than small game or bird hunting,
and the growing popularity of hi-tech equipment like global positioning
satellite systems and radio range finders.19 Numbers of this magnitude
are usually the exclusive province of governments and multi-national
corporations. To break it down to a size that we can more easily wrap
our minds around, hunters in the United States spend $397.5 million
every week, or $56.6 million every day.
To put these numbers in perspective, in the previous year, 1995, the
gross revenues from all sources for Walt Disney Enterprises were only
$12.1 billion, for Apple Computers only $11.1 billion, and for
Time-Warner only $8.1 billion.20 Every hunter who quits or dies and is
not replaced represents $1500 lost to the hunting industry every year,
which means that a decline of just 13,800 hunters (or 1 percent) costs
the industry $20 million annually.
The recipients of the $21 billion spent each year by hunters include the
manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of the full spectrum of hunting
products, ranging from firearms and ammunition to archery equipment
to outdoor clothing, camping gear, and related accessories. They also
include hunting lodges and guides, as well as hotels, motels, and
restaurants. Together, these make up "the hunting industry."
But there are other beneficiaries of the big bucks spent each year on
recreational hunting, and they are important allies of the hunting
industry: state wildlife agencies.
CONTINUE
http://fundforanimals.ctsg.com/library/documentViewer.asp?ID=116&table=
Agencies, and Children Hunting Children
5/9/00, The Fund for Animals
Published by The Fund for Animals, May 2000
Authored by Norm Phelps based upon research by Peter Petersan, Haley
Smith, and the author.
"'That was my deer rifle, and it was set deadly accurate . .
. At 200 yards, if that crosshair was on it, you pull that
trigger . . . ' The grandfather's voice trailed off."
Allen G. Breed, The Associated Press, reporting the words
of Arkansas wildlife conservation officer Doug Golden after
his grandson had taken part in the killing of four children
and a teacher. The Bergen Record Online, March 26, 1998
A HUNTING STORY
Mitch pulled off on the side of the road, climbed out of the van, and
headed into the woods wearing his camouflage shirt and pants, the kind
deer hunters wear to break the outline of the human form so the gaze
of their prey will slide over them. Slung carefully under his arm with the
barrel pointed toward the ground was a .44 Ruger deer rifle. Walking
quietly, he glanced up at the sun flickering through the trees; it was
midday, later than most hunters go in, but Mitch knew what he was
doing. Like all good hunters, he and his buddy had scouted the area.
They knew where the game would be, and they had found the perfect
spot to set up, a wooded hill overlooking a clearing. Deer and people
rarely notice things higher than eye level.
Mitch had just settled in when he heard a rustling in the dead leaves
and saw his friend Drew slipping up beside him. Although younger,
Drew was the experienced hunter, starting when he was six with a BB
gun that he used to hunt small birds; last year, he had graduated to a
shotgun and bagged his first duck; ever since, he had been looking
forward to his first deer. A deer is a rite of passage for a young hunter.
In the hunting culture of rural America, when you drop your first deer,
you're no longer a child playing at hunting; you're a man.
Mitch handed Drew the camouflage jacket and the Remington .30-06
deer rifle with a telescopic sight that he had brought for his friend, and
the two young hunters turned to survey the killing field, an open, grassy
area about a hundred yards down the hill. Easy range, especially for
the Remington with the scope sight. But no problem for the Ruger
either. Drew had been taught to shoot and to hunt by his father and his
grandfather, enthusiastic hunters and firearms collectors. His father
had also introduced Drew to a sport called Practical Pistol Shooting, in
which the participant walks through a course and shoots at pop-up
targets. The goal is speed and accuracy. Drew had neither. But the
lesson of hunting is that the right firearm and the right tactics eliminate
the need for skill. By choosing his weapon carefully and showing a little
ingenuity and patience, anybody able to hold and fire a rifle can kill.
The rifle overcomes its operator's deficiencies; there are paraplegic
hunters, one-armed hunters, even blind hunters, and with the right
weapon, they can all bag their prey. As Drew's grandfather, a state
wildlife conservation officer, said of the gun Drew had chosen, "With a
rifle with that kind of scope on it, you don't have to have much talent at
shooting. You just aim and pull the trigger."
Mitchell Johnson, age thirteen, and Andrew Golden, eleven, settled in
and surveyed the grassy clearing below them. At the far edge stood a
one-story brick building, Westside Middle School in Jonesboro,
Arkansas, where both were students. The schoolyard was filled with
their classmates and teachers milling around waiting for the all-clear to
sound after a fire alarm. Just as hunters use calls to attract ducks,
geese, and turkeys, and "rattles" to attract deer, Drew had set off the
alarm to draw his prey to the killing ground. Now, he and Mitch glanced
at one another, picked their targets, and began firing. When they were
finished, four school children and a teacher were dead and eleven more
children were wounded.1
CHILDREN KILLING CHILDREN
For decades, defenders of hunting smugly assured the American public
that children killing children was an urban plague against which small
towns and rural areas were inoculated by their culture of sport hunting.
Hunting, they told us, taught young people to respect firearms and to
respect life, practically guaranteeing that they would never turn a gun on
a human being. Exactly how killing taught respect for life, they never
quite explained; it was an article of faith, and anyone who questioned it
was dismissed as someone who didn't understand the rural values that
had made America great.
Events of the last six years have shown how tragically misguided that
notion is. Children raised in a hunting culture, sometimes wearing
hunting garb and employing hunting tactics, like Mitchell Johnson and
Andrew Golden, have been killing other children with hunting weapons at
a stunning rate. They have shown beyond any reasonable argument
that the moral and psychological distance between killing a defenseless
animal and killing a defenseless human being is a lot shorter than
hunters would like us to believe.
May 26, 1994, Union, Kentucky: High school senior Clay Shrout
shoots his parents and two sisters and takes a class hostage.
Like Andrew Golden, Shrout has a history of shooting birds with a
BB gun.2
November 15, 1995, Lynnville, Tennessee: High school senior
Jamie Rouse kills a teacher and a student and wounds another
student with a rifle.3
February 2, 1996, Moses Lake, Washington: Fourteen-year-old
Barry Loukaitis kills two classmates and a teacher and wounds
another classmate with a .30-30 deer rifle.4
July, 1996, Moses Lake, Washington: a fourteen-year-old boy
breaks into a house and holds the homeowner hostage with a
hunting rifle.5
December, 1996, Moses Lake, Washington: a fourteen-year-old
boy uses a hunting rifle to kill his mother and stepsister before
turning the weapon on himself.6
February 19, 1997, Bethel, Alaska: Evan Ramsey, age sixteen,
kills his high school principal and a fellow student with a
twelve-gauge shotgun.7
October 1, 1997, Pearl, Mississippi: After killing his mother, Luke
Woodham, 17, takes a .30-30 hunting rifle to school and shoots
two female students, killing them both.8
December 1, 1997, West Paducah, Kentucky: High school
student Michael Carneal kills three members of a school prayer
group and wounds five others. The murder weapon is a pistol,
but Carneal is also carrying two shotguns and two hunting rifles
at the time of the murders.9
December 15, 1997, Stamps, Arkansas: Todd Colt, age
fourteen, wounds two of his fellow students with his father's
rifle.10
March 24, 1998, Jonesboro, Arkansas: Mitchell Johnson, eleven,
and Andrew Golden, thirteen, kill four students and a teacher
and wound eleven others, six seriously, with deer hunting rifles.
Golden is an avid hunter who was taught the sport by his father
and grandfather, the latter a wildlife conservation officer with the
Arkansas Division of Fish and Game.11
May 19, 1998, Fayetteville, Tennessee: A high school senior kills
a classmate.12
May 21, 1998, Springfield, Oregon: Kipland Kinkel uses a .22
caliber hunting rifle to kill his father and mother, then drives to
Thurston High School, where he shoots 26 of his fellow students,
killing two.13
May 20, 1999, Conyers, Georgia: Fifteen-year-old T. J. Solomon
wounds six students with a hunting rifle taken from the collection
of his stepfather, an avid hunter who keeps more than a dozen
hunting rifles in his gun cabinet.14
The list is mind-numbing: Fourteen shooting incidents in six years, 27
people murdered and 50 wounded by children and teenagers living in
communities where hunting is a way of life. Many came from hunting
families, and nearly all killed human beings with weapons kept for
killing animals. No one can any longer claim that hunting teaches
children respect for life. In fact, we now have to ask the opposite
question: Does hunting teach children that life is cheap and that
shooting those who cannot protect themselves is the way of "real men"?
YOUR GOVERNMENT IN ACTION: TEACHING
CHILDREN TO KILL
Apparently oblivious to this mounting epidemic of children from hunting
communities killing other children with hunting weapons, the sport
hunting industry, including state wildlife agencies, and the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service (FWS), are mounting a massive, nationwide campaign
to recruit children into hunting. Consider these examples:
The Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission sponsors special
hunts on public land for children as young as eight years old. Fourteen
states, including Arkansas, Ohio, New Mexico, and Maryland have
children's hunts with no minimum age limit. All told, a survey of state
wildlife agencies conducted by The Fund for Animals reveals that in
1999, 48 states sponsored children's hunts.
A growing number of states now offer cut-rate hunting licenses to
children under a certain age, usually sixteen. Colorado's "Youth
Combination Small Game Hunting, Furbearer, and Fishing License" costs
just one dollar, as opposed to $15 for an adult license. In an attractive
brochure, the Colorado Division of Wildlife announces in boldface type
that for this Youth License, "There is no minimum age. (For example, an
eight-year-old with a Hunter Safety/Education card can buy one of these
licenses.)"15 Not to be outdone, New Jersey offers resident and
non-resident children ages ten through thirteen a hunting license for
three dollars, as opposed to $22 for a resident adult license or $100
for non-residents.16 Apparently deciding to play it safe and get their
money up front, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries
offers for $250 a Junior Lifetime Hunting License to children under
twelve. As with Colorado, there is no minimum age; the child must
simply have passed the state's hunter education class.17
But even this is only a small part of the picture. In public schools, in
state and national forests, even on federal lands designated as wildlife
"refuges," children all across America are being recruited into
recreational hunting by a politically powerful coalition that includes the
hunting industry, state wildlife agencies, and agencies of the federal
government. Funded by a combination of public and industry money,
these initiatives are part of a campaign whose strategy has been being
mapped out by academics at prestigious universities and in private
think tanks.
This massive effort to recruit children into recreational hunting is
justified to the public with noble sounding phrases like "responsible
wildlife management," "preserving American traditions," and "passing
on family values." But there is another factor that is seldom
mentioned---money.
HUNTING FOR BIG BUCKS
Killing animals for pleasure is big business. Very big business. The
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an agency of the Department of the
Interior, reports that in 1996, the last year for which statistics are
available, hunters spent $20.67 billion on their sport.18 Despite a
decline in the number of hunters during the same period, this is up
from $14 billion in 1991, apparently due to an increase in big game
hunting, which is far more expensive than small game or bird hunting,
and the growing popularity of hi-tech equipment like global positioning
satellite systems and radio range finders.19 Numbers of this magnitude
are usually the exclusive province of governments and multi-national
corporations. To break it down to a size that we can more easily wrap
our minds around, hunters in the United States spend $397.5 million
every week, or $56.6 million every day.
To put these numbers in perspective, in the previous year, 1995, the
gross revenues from all sources for Walt Disney Enterprises were only
$12.1 billion, for Apple Computers only $11.1 billion, and for
Time-Warner only $8.1 billion.20 Every hunter who quits or dies and is
not replaced represents $1500 lost to the hunting industry every year,
which means that a decline of just 13,800 hunters (or 1 percent) costs
the industry $20 million annually.
The recipients of the $21 billion spent each year by hunters include the
manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of the full spectrum of hunting
products, ranging from firearms and ammunition to archery equipment
to outdoor clothing, camping gear, and related accessories. They also
include hunting lodges and guides, as well as hotels, motels, and
restaurants. Together, these make up "the hunting industry."
But there are other beneficiaries of the big bucks spent each year on
recreational hunting, and they are important allies of the hunting
industry: state wildlife agencies.
CONTINUE
http://fundforanimals.ctsg.com/library/documentViewer.asp?ID=116&table=