On Wednesday, March 15, a coalition of guides and hunters often called Maine Hunters United for Sunday Searching (MHUSH) introduced its endorsement of a invoice that will enable for some types of Sunday looking within the Pine Tree State. At present, Maine is one among a small handful of states—all alongside the Jap Seaboard—that prohibit or in any other case limit looking on Sundays. If handed and signed into legislation, LR 1561 would allow Mainers to hunt with a bow or a crossbow on Sundays, as long as they pay a $31 price to the Maine Division of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.
Jared Bornstein is the Govt Director of Maine Hunters United for Sunday Searching. He helped craft the invoice and has been on the forefront of a number of challenges to Maine’s longstanding ban on Sunday looking over time.
Bornstein informed Discipline & Stream that Maine’s Sunday looking ban is likely one of the most antiquated looking rules within the nation. “Our legislation really got here from Massachusetts again once we had been a colony of the Puritans down there,” he stated. “Maine and Massachusetts legal guidelines are essentially the most longstanding and oldest blue legal guidelines within the nation, and it’s been a combat to alter them.”
Like Maine, Massachusetts enforces a whole prohibition on looking on Sundays. Different states with full or partial bans embrace: South Carolina, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, West Virginia, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. However the so-called Blue Legal guidelines are steadily fading away as increasingly hunters like Bornstein stand as much as problem them.
A lot of the opposition that Bornstein has encountered throughout his marketing campaign to legalize Sunday looking in Maine has come from individuals who argue that non-public lande house owners deserve a day of reprieve from looking actions. In Maine, liberal land entry legal guidelines present hunters with a excessive diploma of entry of personal property.
However Bornstein stated that that argument is a straw man. “The explanation we now have these liberal entry legal guidelines is as a result of Maine is 95 % privately-owned,” he stated. “And it’s all timber firm land. The timber firms don’t care about individuals looking on Sundays. They’ve land in all places. They’ve land in New Hampshire and Vermont, and each of these states enable Sunday looking. It’s a pretend argument made up by individuals who don’t need instances to alter.”
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Bornstein and MHUSH are additionally suing the state in a bid to get the ban overturned on the judicial stage. That lawsuit is on the docket of the Maine Supreme Courtroom, Bornstein stated, and he believes that LR 1561 might see a listening to as early as April. “This invoice polls rather well,” he stated. “Seventy-three % of the state both likes it or doesn’t care—so I don’t see any purpose why it shouldn’t cross.”
