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“It’s a scary thought,” said Robert Kwiatkowski, chairman of the town of Eagle in Waukesha County. “A high-powered rifle has a heck of a lot more trajectory than a shotgun slug. Once the projectile leaves the barrel, you don’t know where it is going to wind up, especially in an area where you have a lot of development. Our growth has been tremendous the past 10 years.”
State wildlife experts say there is no proof that rifles cause more hunting accidents than shotguns.
Six years ago when an always-fatal brain disease was discovered in deer near Mount Horeb, the state Department of Natural Resources allowed deer hunters to use rifles in some counties to kill more deer and eradicate the disease from the herd. That included western Dane County.
“We have had it for six years,” said Alan Crossley, the DNR’s chronic wasting disease coordinator. “One of the things that people who don’t hunt much don’t realize is that in shotgun-only counties, handguns have always been legal for hunting deer. There is a lot of calibers of handguns that are same calibers as rifles.”
The DNR believed hunters would be more successful using rifles than shotguns, Crossley said.
But by 2006, a state audit found the agency’s multimillion-dollar efforts to fight the disease were failing and the number of deer in disease areas had grown.
This fall, parts or all of 10 more counties have the shotgun-only restriction lifted — a change recommended by a citizens group that spent nearly a year studying how the DNR should revise it strategy for dealing with the disease.
The group recommended that the policy be simplified, getting back to more traditional hunting, while still trying to reduce deer populations, including allowing rifles to be used in what is now called the chronic wasting disease management zone.
The Natural Resources Board adopted the changes.
“Certainly, we are getting calls about it,” Crossley said. “We had concerns that first year in 2002 when we did it.”
Beginning this fall, deer can be hunted with rifles for the first time in all of Rock, Walworth, Green, Lafayette and Jefferson counties, southern Dodge County, eastern Dane County, southern Waukesha County and the western half of Racine and Kenosha counties, he said.
That leaves 10 counties and parts of three others that only allow shotguns, handguns or muzzleloaders to hunt deer, Crossley said.
“Shotguns are not inherently safer than rifles,” he said. “Accident data from shotgun-only counties versus rifle-only counties don’t support the perception that shotguns were safer.”
A 2007 study in Pennsylvania, another major deer-hunting state, came to the same conclusion, he added.
Kwiatkowski said he wasn’t notified that the DNR even proposed the change and he thinks it’s unwise, given the massive housing development that has occurred around the Kettle Moraine State Forest.
“Neighboring communities were blind-sided by this thing just as much as I was,” said the town leader, who hunts with a shotgun. “My concern is straight projectiles might go through people’s houses, go across the highways and hit cars, endangering the lives of people.”
The range of a shotgun slug is about 200 yards, compared with up to three miles for a rifle bullet.
People from his county who hunt with rifles have gone elsewhere, but with the change and the high cost of gasoline, there is a “high probability we are going to get a lot more hunters down here with high-powered rifles,” Kwiatkowski said.
The town’s fire discharge ordinance is being reviewed to see if it might come into play to block the change, he said. “We will know more next week.”
Crossley said he has no idea how many people who deer hunt with a shotgun also own a rifle.
“If they have only hunted in the southern part of the state, I don’t know if they are going to go out and buy more rifles or if they will keep hunting with shotguns,” he said. “If they own a rifle and a shotgun, I imagine they will choose to use the rifle.”
