The Case for Ending Rifle Use in West Virginia's Spring Gobbler Season
Share
The Case for Ending Rifle Use in West Virginia's Spring Gobbler Season
A safety, biology, and common-sense argument — and a direct response to every objection raised so far
A Near Miss in the Holler
One spring morning, a West Virginia hunter named Gregory Burnette roosted a couple of gobblers the night before and slipped into the hollow in the dark. The birds flew down about fifty yards out — just past shotgun range in the pre-TSS days — and he eased back against a tree to wait them closer. What happened next he described in his own words on Facebook this week:
"Suddenly, 10 feet in front of me, a chunk of dirt and leaves flew up in the air. Before I could completely think WTH was that, I heard the rifle blast. I started screaming there's a man here!"
Two hundred fifty yards away, on neighboring property, an old man in squirrel-hunter brown had opened up with a .30-06 on the gobblers that were walking toward Gregory. The bullet landed ten feet in front of him. He's certain that if the angle had shifted another one to two degrees, he wouldn't have lived to tell the story.
Gregory's not an anti-gun activist. He's a life member of the NRA, one hundred percent pro-gun, one hundred percent on the side of individual freedom. But here's how he ended his post:
"There's just some things that don't mix. Oil and water. Drinking and driving. Spring gobbler hunting and high-powered rifles in our terrain and habitat."
That's the question this article is trying to answer. Not whether rifles should exist. Not whether hunters should be free. Whether high-powered rifles belong in the West Virginia spring gobbler woods — where full camouflage is the uniform, where calling is the whole game, where the shooter and victim are statistically likely to be strangers on adjoining properties, and where a single pulled trigger can carry a lethal projectile for half a mile.
The answer, once you look at the data, is no. Here's why.
What Happened to Colton Shoemaker
On the morning of April 30, 2022, Colton Jon Shoemaker, 28 years old, of Keyser, was turkey hunting with his girlfriend Cody Jose on a farm off Upper Patterson Creek Road in Mineral County. They had set out their decoys. They heard twigs break behind them and saw another hunter sit down by a tree nearby. Shortly after, they heard turkeys above their location and turned uphill to face the birds. While they waited to see what the turkeys would do, a single shot was fired from a .243 rifle.
Colton died from that shot.
The shooter, David William Haggerty, 68, of Burlington, told Natural Resources Police he thought he was shooting at a turkey. He was indicted on two felony counts of wanton endangerment with a firearm, along with misdemeanor charges of negligent shooting, unlawful methods of hunting, and interference with hunters.
Colton Shoemaker is not a statistic. He had a name, a family, a girlfriend, a life. He was doing everything right — legal land, legal hour, setup against cover, with a partner. What he could not control was a man 30 or 40 or 50 yards behind him with a centerfire rifle and a mistaken belief that a movement in the woods was a turkey.
In 2014, the Associated Press reported West Virginia had gone its first spring gobbler season without a fatality or injury since the late 1960s, and that the last fatality had been in 2009. That was a moment worth celebrating. It also turned out to be a statistical blip, not a trend.
West Virginia Is an Outlier. Almost Every Other State Figured This Out.
The most important piece of context missing from this entire debate is that the overwhelming majority of states banned rifles for spring turkey hunting decades ago. We are not proposing something radical. We are proposing to catch up.
Pennsylvania — a state with more turkey hunters than West Virginia has residents — prohibits any centerfire, rimfire, or muzzleloading firearm that propels a single projectile during spring turkey season. Shotguns and archery only. When the Pennsylvania Game Commission banned rifles for fall turkey in 2021, they found that rifles accounted for up to one-third of the fall turkey harvest in some years despite very few hunters using them. That's the "effectiveness" problem in plain numbers — and it's the same reason rifles are so dangerous in spring.
Tennessee: shotgun only, no shot larger than #4. New York, New Jersey, Ohio: no rifles, no handguns. Minnesota, Maine, Iowa, Louisiana: shotguns or archery only. Kentucky hunter Dillon Robinson summed up the Southeast's view in the comments on my post: "I'm in Southeast KY where we're not allowed to use a rifle. It's never really bothered us much only shooting shotguns. The thought of being able to shoot them with a rifle seems completely unfair."
From Diane Richardson, a hunter in New Hampshire: "I have never even heard of anyone hunting turkey with a rifle. My state is shotgun only. Certain shot sizes only."
The list of states that allow rifles in spring gobbler is short: West Virginia, Florida, parts of Texas (the western zone), Wyoming (and Wyoming's Game and Fish Commission is already discussing banning rifle turkey hunting on public lands starting in 2027), and a handful of western states where turkey populations are thin and open terrain makes the shot profile different. Of those, West Virginia is the only Eastern state with dense timber, steep terrain, and high hunter density where rifles remain legal in the spring woods.
We are not in company with Pennsylvania, Virginia's spring shotgun rules, or Kentucky. We are in company with open-country Wyoming, which is moving away from it, and Florida, which has very different terrain. That is not a defensible position for a state whose topography and hunting culture resemble Pennsylvania far more than Wyoming.
The Shooter Isn't Who You Think
Before we argue about whether the rifle or the person is the problem, let's look honestly at who is doing the shooting in turkey hunting incidents. This is the part of the data that surprises everybody, because it runs contrary to the stereotype of the reckless young hunter.
The definitive study is Lengerich, Smith, and Wood, published in the Journal of Trauma in March 2005. It examined 1,345 hunting-related shooting incidents in Pennsylvania from 1987 through 1999. In every category of hunting except turkey, the shooters were disproportionately young, inexperienced, and often under 20. But in turkey hunting — both spring and fall — the researchers found the opposite. Turkey hunting shooters were older, had more years of hunting experience, and were the least likely to have completed hunter education. Turkey hunting victims were also older and more experienced.
And this is the finding that should matter most to every critic on my Facebook post: in turkey hunting, about half the time, the shooter and the victim don't know each other. They are strangers on neighboring properties. That is nearly unique in American hunting. In rabbit hunting, the shooter and victim are in the same party 85 percent of the time. In deer hunting, about 65 percent. In spring turkey, it's 48 percent. In fall turkey, it's 53 percent.
Translate that: more than half the people shot during turkey season are shot by someone they've never met, in a scenario where neither hunter knew the other was there. That is not a "same party, bad communication" problem. That is a "stranger 200 yards through timber with a high-powered rifle" problem.
A New York DEC report on recent hunting incidents reads like a pattern: shooter age 61, 40 years of experience. Shooter age 62, 48 years of experience. Shooter age 55, 41 years. Shooter age 66, 50 years.
David Haggerty was 68. The accident profile fits.
This is not a youth problem. This is not an education problem in the sense we usually mean. This is a complacency problem among older, experienced hunters who trust their instincts, and whose "mistaken for game" judgment error used to be survivable at turkey-shotgun range and no longer is when they pull out a .243.
What a Rifle Actually Does to a Human Body
This is where the argument gets uncomfortable, and it should. We owe it to the Shoemaker family, to the Burnette family, and to every hunter who has had a bullet whine overhead, to be honest about the ballistic difference between a shotgun and a rifle at turkey distances.
A .243 Winchester — the caliber that killed Colton Shoemaker — delivers roughly 1,900 foot-pounds of energy at 100 yards. A standard turkey shotgun load, even a premium tungsten load, delivers a wound pattern measured in surface pellets that rarely penetrate the body cavity at typical turkey-hunting range. A shotgun pellet at 60 yards bruises. At 80 it falls to the ground. A .243 bullet is still lethal at 500 yards and keeps going.
The trauma data says the rest out loud. Studies published in the Journal of Neurotrauma analyzing firearm wounds to the head found hunting rifles produce a 48.7 percent mortality rate. Shotguns produce the lowest mortality rate of any firearm category at 31.9 percent. Rifles were the single most lethal category — and the study's authors made a point that should be bold-printed on every spring gobbler regulation: rifle-wounded patients are more likely to die before reaching the emergency room.
Think about where you hunt in West Virginia. How far is the nearest Level I trauma center from your favorite ridge? For most of us, it's an hour by ground ambulance and a prayer for helicopter weather. The difference between a shotgun wound and a rifle wound in that scenario is often the difference between a survivable injury and a dead hunter.
The International Hunter Education Association tracked 735 firearm fatalities in hunting between 1976 and 2020. Rifles accounted for 49 percent of fatalities while being involved in roughly 25 percent of incidents. Shotguns accounted for 42 percent of fatalities while being involved in roughly 23 percent of incidents. Per incident, a rifle is meaningfully more likely to kill you. That is not opinion. That is what the IHEA database says.
Robbie Burdette put it bluntly in the Facebook thread, and I can't improve on it: "It's a safety issue. You're hunting in full camo making bird noises and sitting behind decoys. Would you rather get dusted with shot or blasted with a .243 in the guts?"
Now Let's Answer the Objections
Dozens of you responded, and your objections deserve real answers — not dismissal. Here they are.
"This is a Second Amendment issue. Any restriction loses my support."
It is not, and here's why. The Second Amendment protects your right to own firearms. It does not dictate the method of take for game animals. If it did, every restriction in the WV hunting regulations book would be unconstitutional — and none of them are.
You cannot use a rifle during muzzleloader season. You cannot use a rifle during archery season. You cannot use rifled slugs during upland bird season. Waterfowl shotguns have to be plugged to hold three shells. Deer hunters in parts of Ohio are restricted to shotgun slugs because of population density. These are all method-of-take restrictions, not weapon bans. Nobody loses a firearm. Nobody loses a right. The weapon just doesn't get carried in the spring gobbler woods.
Eli Henderson framed the absolutist position well in the comments: "So I should be able to go hunt turkeys with a rocket launcher then? That's a weapon." The point is that every hunting season already has method-of-take rules. Arguing the spring gobbler rifle question on Second Amendment grounds is a category error.
"Blame the operator, not the tool."
This is the most respectable objection and deserves the most respectful answer. Richard Robertson — a retired West Virginia Natural Resources Police Officer with 35 years on the job and more turkey incident investigations than most of us will ever see — made this argument directly. His core points were that more hunters are shot with shotguns than rifles, that negligent shooters are the problem, that mandatory jail time for negligent shooting would be more effective, and that banning rifles would deprive disabled and older hunters who physically need them.
Here is what I owe Richard in reply.
On the raw number of shotgun incidents being higher: yes, because the overwhelming majority of spring turkey hunters use shotguns. That's a denominator problem, not an argument about lethality. Per incident, rifles kill at roughly twice the rate of shotguns. If 95 percent of hunters use shotguns and 5 percent use rifles, and both cause equal numbers of incidents, the rifle incident rate per user is 19 times higher. That's not abstract — that's how the math works when a small group disproportionately shows up in the fatality column.
On the operator: yes, negligent operators are always the proximate cause. But method-of-take rules have always existed to reduce the consequences of negligence in environments where the failure modes are predictable. That's why we plug shotguns for waterfowl. That's why muzzleloader season uses muzzleloaders. The question is not whether people should be negligent — they shouldn't. The question is whether we should let the tools match the terrain. Spring turkey, in West Virginia hardwood, with full camouflage and hunter calling, is as predictable an environment for "mistaken for game" errors as exists in American hunting. The Lengerich study documented that 75 percent of turkey incidents involve stalking a called-in sound. We know the failure mode. Handing that failure mode a 500-yard projectile is a policy choice, not an inevitability.
On mandatory jail time: I agree. Completely. Our magistrate courts are a separate disaster — I've written about them — and I would support legislation tomorrow that mandates real jail time and lifetime license revocation for negligent shooting that results in death or serious injury. That is a policy we should both be able to get behind, and it is not mutually exclusive with restricting rifles in the spring woods. We can do both. We probably should do both.
On disabled hunters: this is the one argument I take most seriously, because Wesley Stemple raised it and so did Richard. A .22 Hornet is lighter and has less recoil than a 12 gauge. Some older hunters, some hunters recovering from heart surgery, some hunters with shoulder damage genuinely cannot shoulder a magnum shotgun. Fair. I hear that. But a 20-gauge semi-auto with TSS is lighter and gentler than any centerfire rifle you want to name. A youth-model .410 with TSS is effective to 40 yards and kicks like a BB gun. A crossbow is legal and requires no shoulder strength at all. The accessibility argument, honestly examined, does not require a centerfire rifle. It requires alternatives, and those alternatives exist and are already legal.
"Where's the science? Only 25-30% of accidents involve a rifle."
Roy Mccumbers raised this, and it's a fair citation of the top-line IHEA number. But look at the fatality column of the same database: rifles cause 49 percent of hunting firearm fatalities from roughly 25 percent of incidents. That's the entire scientific argument in one sentence. The rifle is overrepresented among fatalities by a factor of roughly two-to-one relative to its incident rate. Incident rate is not lethality. And for a family burying a hunter, lethality is what matters.
"Slippery slope. Next it'll be crossbows, Sunday hunting, dogs…"
Matthew Foley and Tommy Grose both raised versions of this. I respect the concern — hunters have seen enough erosion of tradition to be skeptical of any new rule. But slippery slope is a logical fallacy, not a policy argument. Every method-of-take restriction is judged on its own merits. Banning rifles for spring gobbler does not automatically lead to banning shotguns, because the argument for one does not generalize to the other. The argument for the rifle ban is specific: high-powered projectiles in dense timber, camouflage, calling, and stranger shooters. The argument does not apply to shotguns, crossbows, or muzzleloaders because the failure-mode math is different.
If you want to argue for all-day hunting, earlier season openers, or scope restrictions on muzzleloaders, those are separate conversations and I'm happy to have every one of them. They don't depend on this one.
"On my own land I should use what I want."
Joseph Lovejoy Jr. raised this, and honestly, it's the argument I find most sympathetic. There is a real difference between hunting 300 acres of your own ground and hunting a patchwork of small private and public tracts.
But here is the hard reality: the bullet doesn't know where the property line is. The old man who shot at Gregory Burnette's gobbler was on his own property. The bullet that landed ten feet from Gregory was on Gregory's property. A .30-06 does not stop at the fence. A .243 does not stop at the ridge. In West Virginia's fragmented land ownership pattern — where you might have ten different property owners inside a square mile — "my land, my rules" stops being a coherent argument at the moment the projectile leaves the barrel. That's why sound-level restrictions, firework ordinances, and livestock fencing laws exist. Your rights end at the property line. With a rifle in dense timber, that line is essentially theoretical.
"Hunters are divided enough. This divides us further."
Jason Pennington, Matthew Foley, and Charles Young Jr. all raised variations of this. I'll be direct: I'm not afraid of a hard conversation inside the hunting community, and neither should any of you be. The hunting community divides itself when it refuses to have hard conversations about safety. What divides hunters is when a spring morning ends with a grieving family, a felony indictment, and a story that ends up in Field & Stream or on CNN making all of us look careless. Having a serious talk about method of take is what functional communities do. Pretending the risk doesn't exist because talking about it might offend somebody is how we lose public support for hunting entirely.
"The harvest numbers are fine. Nothing needs to change."
Philip Chua raised this. Harvest numbers are a wildlife-management metric. The rifle question is a human-safety metric. Those are different conversations. The harvest could be at record highs and the safety argument would still stand or fall on its own merits.
That said, there is a biological argument too, and it's worth making briefly. Penn State and PA Game Commission data found that in some years, rifles accounted for up to one-third of the fall turkey harvest despite being used by a small minority of hunters. That's a disproportionate take-per-hunter ratio. In a state where we are seeing below-average poult recruitment three years running — and where WVDNR itself anticipates harvest dips — concentrating that much take in a small rifle-using minority is a management concern worth taking seriously. It's not the primary argument. It's an additional argument.
"Poor hunters may only own one gun."
Heath Mangold raised this. It's a real concern. But a used single-shot 20-gauge shotgun costs less than most of the centerfire rifles being used on turkeys. You can buy one at any pawn shop in West Virginia for under $150. This is not an access problem the way the comment frames it. Shotguns are the most affordable long guns in America.
"Rifle hunters don't damage meat / Rifle hunters take close shots too."
TaraMatt Hornbeck and Bruce Lilly both said they've hunted with rifles for decades without meat damage. I believe them. I also believe Brendan O'Meally, whose friend's father put a .204 Ruger through a bird at 100 yards and had zero edible breast meat. And Nick Summerfield is right that a head-shot .22 magnum is a Florida tradition, but a head-shot .22 magnum at 40 yards is functionally not the policy we're debating. We're debating a .30-06 at 250 yards across a property line at a moving camouflage-clothed hunter the shooter mistook for a gobbler.
You can be a disciplined rifle hunter and still support this policy, because the policy is not aimed at you. It's aimed at the shooter profile we keep seeing in the incident reports — older, experienced, alone, impatient, certain they saw a bird, wrong.
A Heritage-Rooted Proposal: What the Law Should Look Like
West Virginia is long hunter country. Before there was a state line, before there was a statehood petition, before there were Natural Resources Police or bag limits or season dates, there were men like Lewis Wetzel, Samuel Brady, Simon Kenton, and Jesse Hughes moving through these hardwoods with a Pennsylvania long rifle slung across one shoulder and a hunting bag over the other. The flintlock long rifle — .40 to .50 caliber, single-shot, iron-sighted, patient, and deliberate — is as much a part of this state's identity as coal and mountain music. That heritage is not the problem. That heritage is the model.
The problem is the modern high-velocity centerfire rifle in the spring turkey woods. The solution is to write a policy that draws the line exactly where our own state code has already drawn it once before — at the Mountaineer Heritage Season.
The proposal: In West Virginia's spring gobbler season, legal methods of take should be shotguns, archery equipment, and the specific single-projectile firearms already codified for our January Mountaineer Heritage Season, plus straight-walled pistol cartridge handguns.
Here's what that looks like in plain language:
Legal in spring gobbler under this proposal:
- Shotguns (unchanged — the dominant current method)
- Longbows, recurve bows, and crossbows (unchanged)
- Single-shot side-lock percussion or flintlock muzzleloading rifles, .38 caliber or larger, with iron sights only — the exact Mountaineer Heritage Season standard
- Single-shot side-lock percussion or flintlock muzzleloading pistols, .38 caliber or larger, with iron sights only — same standard
- Handguns chambered in straight-walled pistol cartridges of .357 Magnum or larger — the same class already legal for deer under the Class A-1 stamp
Illegal in spring gobbler under this proposal:
- Any centerfire rifle (.223, .243, .22-250, .30-06, .270, etc.)
- Any rimfire rifle (.22 LR, .22 WMR, .17 HMR, .17 Hornet)
- In-line muzzleloaders, scoped muzzleloaders, Federal FireStick or encapsulated-charge ignitions, double-barreled muzzleloaders, and plug-converted firearms
- Rifles firing bottlenecked cartridges of any caliber
Why this specific line, and not a blanket ban?
Because it is ballistically honest and culturally respectful. Every weapon preserved under this proposal shares three characteristics:
1. Short effective range. A flintlock .40-caliber with a patched round ball is effective out to roughly 75 yards in skilled hands, and starts losing lethality fast beyond that. A .357 Magnum revolver is effective at 50 yards. A .44 Magnum pushes 75. A shotgun caps at 50. Every one of these weapons is self-limiting by physics, unlike a .243 Winchester that is still lethal past 500 yards.
2. Single-projectile discipline. The Heritage muzzleloaders require loading from the muzzle between shots. There is no spray. There is no "shoot at the sound and hope." Every pull of the trigger is a deliberate act that cannot be replayed for 30 to 60 seconds. This is exactly the trigger discipline that matches the spring gobbler setup.
3. Cultural fit. These are the weapons of Appalachian tradition, not Appalachian innovation. If a hunter wants to pursue spring gobbler with a .40-caliber Hawken-style rifle and a powder horn, he is carrying on a tradition older than the state itself, not picking up a deer rifle he had leaned in the corner. Paul "Pab" Benford — the longtime Pocahontas County muzzleloader builder featured in Wonderful West Virginia magazine — has hunted with self-built flintlocks for decades. His worldview and the safety worldview meet at exactly this line.
Why allow pistol-cartridge handguns?
Because they solve a real problem without creating the rifle problem. Richard Robertson and Wesley Stemple were both correct that some older and physically limited hunters genuinely struggle to shoulder a magnum shotgun. A revolver in .357 Magnum or .44 Magnum is lightweight, requires no shouldering, and can be fired one-handed if needed. Its effective range is short enough that a missed shot falls inside roughly the same 100-yard envelope as a shotgun miss. Wesley told us in the comments he's killed spring gobblers with a .22 Hornet — a bottlenecked rifle cartridge — and the honest answer is that a .357 Magnum or .44 Magnum revolver would accomplish the same close-range head or body shot with no additional risk to other hunters. WV already recognizes this distinction in its deer regulations. We should carry it into spring gobbler.
Why not allow scopes on the Heritage firearms?
Because the entire point is close-range, deliberate hunting in matched gear. The Mountaineer Heritage Season rules already prohibit telescopic sights on these muzzleloaders, and the reason they prohibit scopes is the same reason the long hunters didn't have them: scoped precision at distance turns a hunting weapon into a sniper tool. In the spring turkey woods, where "mistaken for game" judgment errors are the dominant failure mode, iron sights force a hunter to identify his target at natural visual resolution — not through 3x magnification that can blur the line between a gobbler and a camouflaged hunter's back.
Why this is a stronger proposal than a pure shotgun-only ban
A pure shotgun-only ban is easier to write and easier to enforce. I would support it tomorrow if it's what the legislature can pass. But the heritage-inclusive proposal does three things a blanket ban doesn't:
It protects the tradition. Nobody can honestly argue this is a modern regulatory overreach when the policy is defined by West Virginia's own codified Mountaineer Heritage standard. A hunter who wants to walk in Lewis Wetzel's footsteps with a flintlock long rifle can still do so in spring gobbler season. The proposal is not anti-tradition. It is pro-tradition in the most specific possible way.
It preserves access for disabled and older hunters. The pistol-cartridge handgun carve-out directly answers Richard Robertson's accessibility concern. It gives hunters who cannot shoulder a magnum shotgun a legal, effective, close-range option that doesn't put a neighbor in the next hollow at risk.
It holds the safety line where it actually needs to be held. The whole safety case is about high-velocity centerfire projectiles carrying lethal energy past property lines into camouflaged strangers. Every weapon preserved under this proposal respects that line. Every weapon excluded crosses it.
The companion policy
Alongside this regulatory change, I would support — and Richard Robertson's comments suggest he would too — a separate piece of legislation mandating real consequences for negligent shooting. Specifically: mandatory minimum jail time and lifetime hunting license revocation for any negligent shooting that results in serious bodily injury or death during any hunting season. Our magistrate courts have been a disaster on this front. The Shoemaker case is currently quiet in the public record. That has to change. Two bills, two different problems, one shared outcome: fewer funerals.
What This Isn't About
This isn't about whether you're a real hunter. Jason Thouvenel said in the comments that "if you 'turkey hunt' with a rifle you are definitely not a turkey hunter," and I understand the sentiment, but I'm not interested in purity tests. Bruce Lilly hunts with a shotgun, killed one gobbler with a .30-06, made a clean kill, did nothing wrong, and is a man I'd share a turkey camp with any day. This article is not a judgment on Bruce.
This isn't about gun control. Nobody proposing this rule wants your rifle, your collection, your pistol, or your ammunition. The centerfire rifle goes home with you after the season — the same way it already does during muzzleloader season, during the Mountaineer Heritage Season, and during archery season.
This isn't about ending tradition. The proposal on the table preserves the oldest tradition West Virginia has — the single-shot flintlock and percussion long rifle our long hunters carried through these hills before this was a state. If anything, it honors that tradition by giving it its proper place in the spring woods alongside the shotgun. What it excludes is the modern high-velocity centerfire rifle, which is neither tradition nor necessity — it's a deer rifle someone brought into turkey season.
This isn't about dividing hunters from each other. The Facebook thread on my post has nearly 200 comments, and the overwhelming majority fall into two camps: hunters who already use shotguns and don't understand why anyone would use a rifle in the spring, and hunters who have had a close call or know someone who has. That's not a divide. That's a consensus with a vocal minority arguing about the principle of the thing.
This is about one specific question: in a setup where you are dressed head to toe in camouflage, making turkey sounds, sitting against a tree, often on a small piece of ground adjacent to someone else's small piece of ground, in steep Appalachian timber where sound carries and sight lines are short — should your neighbor two ridges over be allowed to send a 1,900-foot-pound projectile in your direction because they thought they heard a bird?
Colton Shoemaker's family already answered that question. So did the near-miss for Gregory Burnette. So have the families of every hunter killed in West Virginia by a rifle during spring gobbler over the last forty years, cases that in some instances were never even solved.
West Virginia is one of the last Eastern states to figure this out. It's time.
Shon Butler is a forester, wildlife biologist, and founder of Longspur Tracking & Outfitting, America's largest wounded game recovery operation. He personally authored West Virginia's drone legislation for ethical game recovery and writes regularly on wildlife policy and hunting ethics.