Who’s a true sportsman?

The bumper sticker on the truck in front of me read, “Sportsmen Against Gun Control.” It was right next to one reading, “I’m in the NRA and I Vote!”

I have been a hunter all my life, and I still own several guns. I’ve killed my share of deer, ducks and quail, and for the first several years of my career I was a game warden. So, I’ve been involved with many sportsmen’s groups and led numerous firearms-safety courses. As such, I’m weary of the NRA claiming one of their primary objectives is to protect sportsmen’s rights. Let me define a sportsman:

A sportsman is someone who sits in the driving rain in a duck blind with a two- or three-shot shotgun hoping to have a duck or goose fly within the relatively short range of his shot.

A sportsman is one who spends several hours at a gun range prior to each hunting season ensuring his bolt-action rifle is dead on so he can make a one-shot kill if the opportunity arises.

A sportsman is someone who practices at a trap or skeet range to improve his skill for that fleeting moment a quail or pheasant flies out of the grass.

A sportsman may even take up bow hunting or the use of single-shot muzzle-loaders to increase his skills while greatly lessening his opportunity to bag his quarry.

What a sportsman is not:

A person who thinks military weapons having the most firepower are necessary for sport hunting.

A person who finds the volume of his shots more satisfying than the accuracy of his shots.

A person who believes he needs such capabilities to protect him from his neighbors.

Owning a military weapon designed for combat in close quarters and capable of shooting numerous shots per second and having rapidly changeable high-capacity clips is not the mark of a sportsman. Unless the owner is in the active military, it’s simply the mark of a frightened bully.

I would urge all bona-fide sportsmen’s organizations to join together to insist on a ban on all semi-automatic guns capable of holding more than five shots in their magazines. This would have no effect on 99 percent of this country’s true sportsmen.