There’s safety in numbers for hunters
Texas’ 1.25 million licensed hunters didn’t have a perfect safety record in 2017. But they came as close as they ever have in the 41 years the state has tracked hunting-related accidents, paying particular attention to those resulting in fatalities or involving firearms or bowhunting equipment.
This past calendar year, Texas tied records for the fewest fatal firearms-related hunting accidents (two) and fewest non-fatal firearms-related accidents (18), as well as the lowest ratio of those accidents based on number of hunting licenses sold.
“The good news is, hunting has been and remains a very safe activity,” said Steve Hall, hunter education coordinator for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. “The bad news is, a lot of the accidents we saw this past year were caused by some of the same basic lapses in safety rules that we see every year when looking at incidents. All of those accidents are highly preventable with proper training and awareness by hunters.”
That training — now mandatory for most all Texas hunters born over the past 40-plus years — and widespread peer-topeer reinforcement of basic safety practices almost certainly has played a major role in Texas seeing a profound decline in hunting accidents involving firearms over the past five decades.
TPWD began collecting information on huntingrelated accidents in 1966, the first year the state offered a voluntary hunter education training course.
“The collection methods have been standardized since the 1960s,” Hall said. “We know the data on fatal incidents is strong; we capture all of them. We almost certainly aren’t capturing all the non-fatal hunting-related accidents; a lot are really minor and don’t result in injuries requiring medical attention. But we know it gives us excellent longterm trend information.” Major change over years
Those long-term trends show just how much safer Texas hunters have become over the past half-century. The number of fatal, firearms-related hunting accidents in Texas has declined more than 90 percent over the past 51 years, with non-fatal accidents involving forearms dropping as much as 70 percent in some recent years when compared with those from the mid-1960s.
Those statistics are even more startling when considering the number of licensed hunters in Texas has effectively doubled over that period, from 644,00 in 1966 to 1.25 million in 2017.
Truth is, Texas hunters had a long way to go in the safety area a half-century ago. Hunting accident statistics were sobering.
Over the five-year period of 1966-70, the state annually averaged 26.2 fatal firearms-related hunting accidents and 62.4 non-fatal accidents. The worst year of the lot was 1968, when 37 Texas hunters died in firearms-related incidents and another 68 were involved in non-fatal incidents.
In 1968, Texas saw 12.6 firearms-related hunting accidents per 100,000 hunting licenses issued, according to TPWD data. The rate of fatal accidents that year was 4.3 per 100,000 licenses.
Over the past five calendar years, 2013-2017, the number of fatal hunting accidents involving firearms has averaged 2.8, with an average of 21.8 non-fatal accidents.
In 2017, TPWD documented 1.6 accidents per 100,000 hunting license holders, with a fatality rate of 0.2 per 100,000 licenses. Those numbers represent a more than 95 percent decline in the fatality rate compared with 1968 numbers, with non-fatal accidents barely one-third of those 50 years ago.
The decline in hunting accidents involving firearms began significantly dropping within five years of Texas imposing mandatory hunter education training. That mandatory training began in 1988, when the Texas legislature adopted a law requiring hunters born on or after Sept. 2, 1971, to have taken and passed a stateapproved hunter education course to legally hunt.
The “hunter ed” course, taught by TPWD-trained and certified volunteer instructors, covers firearms safety as well as hunting regulations, wildlife conservation, private property laws, hunting ethics and skills. Originally, the course was taught in a classroom setting over two days and included handson firearms safety training. That has changed over the past decade, with a shift to online courses. Recent changes adopted by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission allow hunter education certification without any hands-on training.
Through 2017, 1.3 million hunters have successfully completed Texas’ hunter education program and received their lifetime certification.
From 1966 through 1991, Texas saw 10 or fewer fatal firearms-related hunting accidents only one year, 1990. After 1991, fatal hunting accidents involving firearms has remained in single digits.
Non-fatal accidents saw similar, if not as dramatic, declines.
The mandatory hunter education rule, combined with a strong push by state agencies and hunting-related business to promote safe hunting practices, had an obvious effect on hunters’ behavior.
While firearms-related hunting accidents in Texas have been significantly reduced, they have not been eliminated.
“Most of the ones that occur now are errors in judgment or forgetting basic safety rules such as careless handling of firearms,” Hall said.
The two fatal hunting accidents involving firearms in 2017 illustrate those points. One of the fatal incidents occurred when members of a group hunting feral hogs at night fired at a scattering sounder of the pigs and hit and killed a member who had separated from the group.
The other involved a young hunter who fired at a rabbit from an elevated blind and the .22 caliber bullet hit, perhaps as a ricochet, and killed an- other young person who was about 150 yards away, walking unseen toward the blind.
Always clearly identifying the target and being aware of what is in front and behind a target are basic safety rules, Hall said.
The non-fatal incidents often involved self-inflicted wounds from handling firearms carelessly. That included pulling loaded firearms from a vehicle, pulling the trigger of a loaded firearm when the muzzle was resting on a foot and dropping a loaded firearm. Forty percent of the non-fatal incidents in 2017 were self-inflicted, Hall said.
The most common incidents involved swinging on game and firing when someone was in the line of fire or firing and having projectiles hit or fall on another person — most often this involves wingshooters and instances such as “peppering” other hunters with shot while dove hunting. Dove hunting accounted for the highest numbers of incidents, 35 percent of the 18 non-fatal incidents reported in 2017.
Hogs are the second most common game being targeted when firearms accidents occur, TPWD data indicates. That number is increasing as hunting feral hogs, especially at night, becomes more and more popular.
“Into the 1980s, we never saw incidents involving hog hunting,” Hall said. “That began increasing in the 1990s and keeps going up.”
It’s worth noting, Hall said, that most of the shooters involved in 2017 incidents had 10 or more years of hunting experience.
“It’s one of those ‘It can’t happen to me’ things,” Hall said. “Complacency gets you in trouble.” Alcohol not big factor
Over the past many years, alcohol has not proven a major factor in firearms-related hunting accidents, TPWD data indicates. This past year, alcohol was involved in only one incident and has been a factor in no more than 15 percent of incidents in any of the past five years.
It seems violating game laws and hunting accidents do have a connection, though. This past year, 45 percent of firearms-related hunting accidents involved violations of Texas hunting regulations or other laws.
Lack of hunter education training remains a common theme in firearms-related hunting accidents. More than half of the people involved in hunting-related firearms accidents over the past decade or so had not completed a hunter education course, TPWD investigations found. In 2017, 25 percent of those involved had not completed a hunter education course.
Texas hunters didn’t have a perfect safety record with firearms this past year, a point soberly illuminated by the two horribly tragic incidents and almost 20 others involving injuries. And with 1.25 million hunters afield, it’s not likely the state will ever see an accident-free year.
Still, Texas hunters have a right to be proud of how far they have come in reducing firearms-related accidents over the past 50 years.