Get off that bike and get your gun
Study reveals that deer hunting is much safer than cycling.
By J. Michael Kelly

Every hunter I know would agree that one shooting accident in the field is one too many. That sentiment may explain why hunting is one of the safest forms of exercise this side of living-room jumping jacks.

Wayne Jones, the Department of Environmental Conservation’s coordinator of sportsmen education, recently put hunting accidents in perspective by comparing field-sport injury rates with those incurred during other activities.

Jones pointed out, for example, that only 92 Americans were killed in hunting accidents during 1997. In the same 12 months, 787 people died in the United States while bicycling and 1,500 others drowned while swimming.

The nation’s 15.4 million hunters were involved in 972 shooting accidents that year, which works out to a rate of one accident per 15,844 hunters.

In the same period, there were 544,561 biking injuries among 45.1 million participants, or about one accident per 83 cyclists. Among 59.5 million swimmers there were 83,772 injuries, which is roughly one for every 710 participants.

Putting things a different way, a person who does all three sports is 191 times more likely to be injured and three times more likely to be killed while bicycling than while hunting. A person is 22 times more apt to be injured and four times more likely to die while swimming than hunting.

It should be noted that all of these figures were gleaned from National Safety Council reports and pertain to accidents that required medical treatment.

Here’s another instructive comparison, courtesy of Jones:

In the last five years, 12 New York hunters were shot to death while deer hunting. That’s the same number of people who died in deer-car collisions on the state’s roads during the same period.