Are you cool with rural folks' hunting guns?

[longship]

39. I live amidst the national forest.

Few roads here are paved due to the fact that the Manistee National Forest carves out a lot of ways to get from here to there. I live in one of those cul de sacs. The forest is one mile south and one mile east, so those roads go nowhere. To the west and north, both hit hard going fairly quickly if you keep on.

There are many working farmers here who have hunted for generations. There are plenty of deer here, too many actually. I have killed several -- no, I don't hunt; I drive. And deer are really, really stupid about automobiles. Everybody who lives here has hit or, much more likely, been hit by a deer while driving. They run right into you.

But the hunters here are not stupid, or cruel. They don't use so-called assault weapons to hunt. I hear gunshots regularly here. It doesn't worry me, even out of season, because I know that somebody is shooting dinner. And the report is always a hunting rifle, not one of lower caliber.

Regardless, I suspect that many more deer die on the roads here than rifle bullets or arrows. They just don't have any sense about automobiles.