I talked to 11 hunters yesterday and none of them said they needed a semi-auto or even a third shot.

I had a family reunion and I have a lot of uncles and cousins who hunt and hunt together every year. I dropped out of hunting 20 years ago after I got 2 grouse with two shots and figured I'd quit while I had a perfect record of never missing.

But there are photos of my relatives with 30-40 birds piled on the front of their cars and a few of my cousins got their first deer before they learned to drive.

You would think given the NRA's portrayal of hunters that these men would all be gun nuts....

Well nothing could be further from the truth. NONE of the ten men or one youth are NRA members, even the four of them who served in the military.

Every single one of them said that for hunting birds there is no need for anything other than a double barrel shotgun, or if you can't afford one, a pump action shotgun. They also said that only ONCE did someone hit three birds with three shots and that was with a Double barrel shotgun and fast reloading skills, not a semi-auto. Of the ones who hunt deer they said that NEVER has a single one of them ever hit anything with the third shot ever and this is over a period of 45 years and involving at least a 60 different hunters over that time. Almost every one of the deer hunters used a single shot rifle, a pump slug gun, or a bow.

The fact is that any gun that fires more than three shots is for killing targets that don't run from the sound of gunfire.

In other words if you fire more than three shots you are wasting ammo, endangering people around you, polluting the soil against the next year's crop of game, and importantly you are scarring away any future game that day with the extra noise.

I still remember one of my uncles nearly crying and cursing himself, because he shot a pheasant when he thought it was a different bird. Even though pheasants were legal to shoot he explained to me that they were too rare around this area to kill even if the Gaming Commission didn't forbid it. He said, "I really wish we could just stun these birds with rubber shot or something. It's not like when i was a kid and our family needed the meat. Besides you are the only chef in the family good enough to make any of these birds taste better than a turkey from the store. i want you to take a good look at this dead pheasant because it will be the last one you ever see on this land living or otherwise."

I wonder if hunters like my family are the norm and are drowned out by all the NRA crap.I guess that is too bad because the hunters of my family are the kind of people other hunters should aspire to be.