It looks like there are plans afoot to make both Lehigh and Northampton counties “shotgun only” for hunting:
Currently, the restriction on rifle hunting applies only in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties. However, a proposal on the agenda for the commission’s Tuesday business meeting would prohibit deer hunting with a rifle throughout Wildlife Management Unit 5C, which also would be significantly expanded to include the Reading area and all of Lehigh and Northampton counties except a small sliver adjacent to the Blue Mountain.
If the measure is adopted, the only rifles that would remain legal for hunting use in the territory would be less powerful .22-caliber rimfires, which could be used for small game such as squirrels or furbearers such as foxes and coyotes.
I guess the PGC decided the study that showed shotgun hunting isn’t any safer was without merit.
Not to mention you can just drop a rifled slug barrel into any shotgun and load it with all sorts of high-tech saboted bullets, toss in a scope and you can bubba-up any rifle you want.
I’m not a hunter or anything, but this strikes me as dumb as any other law.
Not to mention the ballistics of a standard one-ounce shotgun slug…at least a rifle bullet looses a lot of energy going through thick brush….
I believe that this vote has been postponed. They got a lot of feedback that the ban was too far reaching and covered areas that didn’t need it. The vote has not been rescheduled.
As a Californian I see this as creeping incrementalism. First no Rifles just for starters, soon no rifled-slugs, then no shot greater (or less) than X, then no bore greater than…
I might buy it if there was a concerted movement within the PGC to wipe out hunting, but there isn’t. The PGC depends on hunting for its very existence, so they have little self-interest in seeing the number of hunters decline.