My place my rules. Are you questioning if you would qualify? The requirements of a general shooting proficiency test would not be difficult to determine.
I believe the test should be yearly. I also believe people should have to requalify for a drivers license every other year as well as be approved to pull any type of a trailer. There are far too many morons on the road that are on bald tires, 3 lug nuts and a steering knuckle held on by a nail with no experience or knowledge of how to operate a vehicle or trailer properly. I am at a point I won’t lend my friends trailers anymore as they always come back damaged. Guns are the same. Hunting should be as well. If we reduced the number of ill equipped poorly prepared people by requiring only those that are “qualified/ trained” to operate the equipment then we would all benefit. Based on your points above, we should allow anyone to fly a commercial jet or a semi just so we are fare. I am not interested in fare. I am interested in improving hunting and shooting sports on the whole. If the qualification for entry eliminate those in the gene pool that can’t provide or won’t put in the time to learn, then I am fine with them sitting out. Survival of the fittest. Let’s raise the IQ of the gene pool, not lower it.
Depends on the circumstances, clay pigeons at 100 yards standing offhand I give myself 50/50 on if I would pass. Any type of support even standing leaning off a tree and I’m 90% confident, something more solid like prone or a tripod and I’d give myself just shy of 100% confidence.
You are welcome to set such rules on your property, we have rules of our own that we enforce on ours. However setting restrictive barriers that require time, effort and money to overcome could have far more negative consequences than it does positive ones. And since hunting rules are state based you would end up with 50 different sets of rules and requirements for such a test some of which may not be compatible with other states.
Per your examples hunting =/= driving, commercial pilots or semi truck drivers. For many driving is a requirement for their way of life while commercial pilots and truck drivers are being paid to do so. What that means is you can put additional training restrictions on them and still maintain a significant pool of qualified applicants due to their interest in maintaining their way of life.
Hunting however is a hobby that is not only voluntary but in many cases already requires a significant time and monetary investment to get started and maintain. As a result the more restrictions you put in place the more hunters you carve out and while it would eliminate some bad ones it could also eliminate a large number of otherwise good ones.
For example PA has a percentage of hunters that socially hunt once a year for the opening day or two of rifle deer season and have been doing so for years if not decades. They aren’t serious hunters, rarely shoot deer but every year they buy a license and head to camp to spend time with their buddies hunting. Requiring them to drive to a range and spend several hours waiting to take a qualifying test with dozens of others would cause a number of them to drop out as to them it isn’t worth the hassle. Add in multiple qualifiers for different equipment such as archery, muzzleloader and shotgun and now you’ve turned getting your yearly qualification into an all day or multi day event which could turn away a greater number of people.
Sure you could argue that they weren’t that into it and we would be better off with less hunters crowding public lands but that sharp drop in hunter numbers could cause an unintended rippling effect among people that don’t hunt. The two main things I can think of would be the shrinking voter base and the reduced overall visibility of hunters as a group.
For hunter visibility it breaks down to how non hunters perceive hunters. With hunting rarely making it into the public eye, and the media choosing to highlight a handful of negative cases over the multitude of positive ones, public perception could be skewed against hunters if the general public doesn’t have someone they know as a counter to the negative. I can think of several people who would otherwise be anti hunting that are fine with it directly because a well regarded family member was a hunter. Heck my own marriage exists because my wife’s grandfather hunted, if it wasn’t for him my mother in law and by extension my wife would most likely have both been anti hunters.
The other issue is the reduced voting base, while we may not all agree, the 15 to 17 million hunters are still a significant portion of voters and as a result politicians aren’t outright going to vote against them for fear of reprisal. Take again for example PA, some politicians last year tried to get their hands on $150 Million from our Game commissions funds which would have significantly curtailed their management goals as well as strip PA of its P&R funding to the tune of $41 million per year. The only reason they didn’t is because hunters were a large enough base that they didn’t want to risk the backlash.
Additionally what happens when anti hunting groups get control of the state agencies like in Colorado? You basically just handed them a blueprint to get rid of even more hunters by increasing the difficulty or inconvenience of the qualifications to the point most people just give up.
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