By J.R. Robbins
Managing Editor, NRAhuntersrights.org
Fairfax, VA--(Ammoland.com)- Recently a UK news agency banned the sale of hunting publications to anyone under 14, an absurd move that many citizens are trying to overturn.
If you read that story and thought, “It can’t happen here,” don’t be so sure, because PETA is trying hard to make it happen.
Using their characteristic combination of outlandish lies, unsupported allegations and emotional rant, PETA’s EVP, Tracy Reiman just sent a letter to the CEO of the Hudson Group, which owns Hudson’s Booksellers, asking that hunting magazines be kept “out of reach” of minors and banned for sale to anyone under 18.
Among other falsehoods, the letter likens hunting to pornography, tries to link hunting with mass murder and states flatly that hunting magazines “encourage violent behavior in young people.”
While most intelligent people have gradually begun to consider PETA a joke, attempts to control what our children read is no laughing matter.
At the risk of boring you with a personal anecdote, let me state how important hunting magazines were to me as a kid growing up near Baltimore, MD.
I did not grow up in a hunting family, and no one I knew owned a firearm. One day I ran across a magazine called Outdoor Life, and it’s no exaggeration to say a whole new world opened up for me. My world had been concrete basketball courts, crowded bus stops, and bad air quality. My exposure to wildlife was nonexistent. And the fact that I write about hunting today can be traced back to the first page of that magazine I opened. From that magazine, I became aware that something called “hunter education” existed. I found a class. My parents agreed, after weeks of wrangling, to let me get a .22 rifle. I began to hunt, and I found something profoundly meaningful.
Today, books are written and seminars are held focusing on how vital it is to get kids outdoors. School systems are bringing outdoor skills classes into their curriculum. For some kids in urban areas, hunting magazines could become for them exactly what they were to me—a stimulus to pursue hunting and fishing, or at least to get outdoors.
PETA may be fine with kids spending 16 hours a day playing video games and watching television, but I’d rather see a kid out hunting with his father.
We have a call into the Hudson Group asking for their reaction. If you’d like to send them your own comments, urging them to ignore PETA’s letter, address them to jdidomizio@hudsongroup.com.
The PETA letter appears below:
November 13, 2012
Joseph DiDomizio
President and CEO
Hudson Group
Dear Mr. DiDomizio,
On behalf of PETA and our more than 3 million members and supporters, I am writing to ask you to keep hunting magazines sold at your stores out of the reach and view of minors by displaying them alongside adult publications such as Playboy and Penthouse. We also urge you to refuse to sell these magazines to anyone under 18 years of age. Hunting magazines present killing as fun and exciting and encourage violent behavior in young people.
These publications recklessly promote killing without explaining the devastating consequences. The stress that hunted animals suffer from being pursued compromises their natural feeding habits, making it hard for them to store the fat and energy that they need to survive the winter. Hunting also disrupts migration and hibernation patterns. For animals like wolves, who mate for life and live in close-knit family units, hunting can devastate not only entire families but entire communities. And many animals who are shot with a bullet or an arrow flee injured—only to die slow, agonizing deaths from blood loss, shock, starvation, gangrene, or attacks by predators.
Like other forms of casual or thrill violence, hunting spawns a dangerous desensitization to the suffering of others. According to published reports, many of the young people who have opened fire on their schoolmates—including 16-year-old Andrew Golden who, along with an accomplice, killed five people at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., and 17-year-old T.J. Lane, who killed three people at Chardon High School in Cleveland earlier this year, had first expressed their bloodlust by hunting animals. Not every hunter will kill a human, of course, but in this era of escalating violence, it is irresponsible and downright dangerous to allow kids access to magazines that promote killing for “fun.”
Your British counterpart, W.H. Smith, has already implemented an age restriction on the sale of hunting magazines, and we urge you to follow suit. Please protect animals and impressionable children by keeping hunting magazines out of young people’s reach and sight—just as you would with pornography. Thank you. I look forward to your reply.
Sincerely,
Tracy Reiman
Executive Vice President
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