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The thread on boar shooting with a shotgun caused me to re-visit old memories of deer season in America. For most of my working life I worked for Eastman Kodak and thirty years ago I had a placement for three and a half years in Rochester NY in an area described as "upstate New York" For me in many ways it was shooting heaven but I also witnessed some crazy things and deer season was downright crazy. Deer season was about 5 weeks of the year. You paid about 50 dollars for a licence and that gave you three tags. The thing was any idiot could buy a gun and provided they could actually work out how to load it off they would go deer hunting. The first people I ever saw wearing high viz clothing were hunters. Its no wonder why, across America as a whole over 1000 people are shot by other hunters every year. Many times the shooter is never traced In Upstate New York in 2017 they were actually congratulating themselves because they only had four fatal and thirteen non fatal accidental shootings that season. That's their idea of good? Upstate New York restricts deer hunting in many areas to shotguns with slugs in areas of 'high population' although high population is subjective. There are vast tracts of unfenced unregulated woodland where people just wandered in and hunted as they wished, no permissions, nothing of the sort. People with no understanding of ballistics, backstops, shot placements would just wander around with a couple cases of booze and blaze away. It didn't matter how many deer they wounded or how many hunters they killed as long as they got their three tags filled. People who lived in deer hunting areas would send their kids and dogs away to family in safer areas during deer season. Even in areas where hunting with rifles was allowed the only criterion was 'not rimfire' . People would shoot at deer on the skyline, on roads etc every house and barn had bullet holes. It was total madness, and it was F-F F- 'flippin' dangerous. We have to be grateful we live in a country where rules may appear draconian but nobody dies