Hunting safety starts early

• By JOE MACALUSO
• Advocate Outdoors writer
• Published: Nov 1, 2009

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Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series about surviving the hunting season.

When Randy Young decided it was time to pass along the hunting tradition in his family, he knew where to start.

It was where his dad started, and now it was his son Andrew’s turn to learn the same lessons.

Now a seventh grader at Our Lady of Mercy, Andrew Young already has taken his fair share of game for a 12 year old, but one of Randy’s first lessons in taking game is only a part of the hunting experience.

“My dad took me deer hunting at the same age,” Randy Young said. “And the same things my dad taught me are the same things that Andrew and I go through today … through the safety checks, the safe handling of a weapon.”

Andrew’s drills, like Randy’s years ago, began long before climbing into a deer stand.

“We started out learning how to shoot at Hunter’s Run (Gun Club), and we started by teaching all the safety rules,” Randy Young said.

Those first steps were followed by trips to the woods. Randy Young said he carries the rifle to and from the stand — “I supervise everything, heavily supervise,” he said — and makes sure weapons safety takes precedent over the simple act of pulling the trigger.

“Like my dad taught me, I want (Andrew) to respect the weapon, to respect the power of it and the danger of it,” Randy Young added. “And like my dad insisted, we do not kill unless we take it home and eat it. It’s important to teach the practical aspects of hunting, too.”

Soon, Andrew Young will take the state-approved Hunter Safety Course, a step Randy Young figures is the next big step before he passes along another tradition. He sat with his dad for years learning about gun safety, about fields and forests, about the animals they hunted until, “… when I was 15, he let me hunt on my own.”

In the coming weeks, thousands of Capital City area hunters will “hunt on their own,” and that means someone, usually more than one of them, will become a statistic.

Among those hunting-related stats is that more than one-third of all firearms accidents are from self-inflicted wounds.

That’s why one of the long-published 10 Commandments of Hunting Safety is “To treat all guns as if they are loaded.” That’s because these hunting season accidents occur in more places than the field.