Why the State With the Most Deer Hunters in America Banned the Deer Rifle

In 1905, Pennsylvania outlawed buckshot for deer and required a single bullet, and 59 years later, the same agency banned the rifle in five counties and ordered buckshot instead. The man who wrote the first rule was Dr. Joseph Kalbfus, chief game protector of a state with 500 deer left in it. The man who saw the second one coming was Roger Latham, the game commission’s own chief of wildlife research, who printed the warning in the agency’s own magazine in 1953 and was fired for repeating it.

Picture a gun counter in Bucks County, fall 1964, buckshot on the glass, and on the wall behind it, a rifle nobody in that county could legally carry after deer. Was it about the bullet, or how many houses the bullet now had to pass? One man lost his job for being right, [music] the others kept their rifles and lost anyway.

The rule arrived the way most [music] rules do, as a paragraph in a booklet. In the fall of 1964, the Pennsylvania Game Commission drew a line around the counties pressed against Philadelphia, Bucks, [music] Montgomery, Chester, Delaware, and the city itself. Inside that line, the rifle was out. What the surviving record gives as the reason isn’t safety, it’s deer.

There were too many of them in that corner of the state, and the commission wanted them killed, so it handed those counties more days to hunt antlerless deer and took the rifle away in the same motion. A man could hunt longer, he just couldn’t hunt with the gun in his own hallway. The rifle stayed in the rack, a borrowed shotgun came out, and it sat wrong on the shoulder that whole first morning, heavy at the muzzle, short in the reach, built for a different animal at a different distance.

[music] It was the second time Pennsylvania had told deer hunters what they could not shoot with. The The time the state banned the opposite thing. In 1905, the legislature made it unlawful to use buckshot on deer or to kill [snorts] one with any gun throwing more than a single pellet, bullet, or ball at one discharge.

One projectile, aimed or nothing. That law was not written for a state thick with deer. It was written for a state that had almost none. And by the close of the 1800s, the estimates put the survivors near 500 animals in the whole Commonwealth. If one bullet was the honest way to kill a deer in 1905, what had changed by 1964? The bullet or the state? Enforcing it was Dr.

Joseph Kalbfus, chief game protector and secretary of the commission from 1895 to 1919. He wrote that the hunters he policed believed they had an inherent right to destroy game and birds at pleasure. He wasn’t reaching for a phrase. In 1906 alone, 14 game protectors in this state were shot at and three of them were killed. In the digest of the game laws he edited in 1911, the line naming what a deer could lawfully be killed with runs about a sentence long.

That sentence was the whole argument. What Kalbfus and the men who followed him built wasn’t really a deer herd. It was a bargain. The terms were simple and they were moral. In 1907, the state left only antlered deer legal, which meant a hunter who passed on a doe wasn’t being managed, he was behaving. Deer were brought in from other states and turned loose.

Refuges were carved out of the timber. In 1913, a hunting license appeared and cost a dollar, and men paid it. And by 1927, more than half a million Pennsylvanians were buying one every year. The bargain paid. That part nobody disputes. A farmer up in the ridges could take his son to the edge of a cut and show him a track pressed into wet ground, and it was the first one either of them had ever seen.

20 years earlier, that walk didn’t exist in most of this state. Now it did because men had been told to hold their fire and had done it. Nobody ever framed it as arithmetic. The state didn’t say it was managing a number. It said a man who followed these rules was a certain kind of man and that the rules were what made him one.

Restraint was sold as character. It worked. The plan for the year the deer stopped being rare was never written down. Then there’s the question of how a Pennsylvania hunter learned what to think. There were no forums and no comment sections. There was print once a month, and the most trusted magazine in the state was Pennsylvania Game News, published by the Game Commission itself.

The referee owned the press. A hunter read it at his kitchen table with the coffee going cold, folded it back, carried it into a gun shop, and started an argument with somebody else’s sentences in his mouth. Opening day wasn’t a hobby here. It was a civic event. Schools closed, shops half empty. License sales in this state peaked at 1.3 million in 1982.

Texas sells more hunting licenses today, but Texas hunting is a dozen animals across a dozen landscapes. Pennsylvania’s was one animal. Almost all of it was deer. So when the commission wanted a hunter to believe something, it had reach him, and it reached him in his own house. What happens when the only magazine hunters trust is printed by the same people who write the rules? If this is the kind of history you want more of, the arguments that never made the highlight reel, subscribe and stay with me.

The turn in this story isn’t the ban. It sits in the middle in two paragraphs the state printed itself, and it changes what everything before it meant. Long before the suburbs, the herd gave the commission its first warning, and the commission went looking for it. A federal biologist named Vernon Bailey was detailed to Pennsylvania at the Game Commission’s request to find out why deer were dying in large numbers.

The date on the surviving account is hard to pin down. The account itself is plain enough. He met J. B. Truman, the Commission’s executive secretary in Harrisburg, drove west through Mifflin and Centre and Clearfield, picked up a supervising game protector named Kelly on the way, and stayed the night with a refuge keeper named Rerrick.

What he found had less to do with hunting than with a tree. The chestnut blight had killed the chestnuts. For generations, those trees dropped the mast that carried deer through winter, and now they were standing dead or already down, and the oaks meant to replace them weren’t big enough to make acorns yet. The herd the state had spent 30 years rebuilding had more mouths than the mountain had food.

Picture men in shirt sleeves in May walking a refuge counting carcasses. You can still read the shape of that problem in old photographs of Pennsylvania timber. There’s a line in the brush about 5 ft off the ground, level, cut as clean as a saw mark, running for miles. Everything below it eaten. Everything above it untouched. The man who said it out loud worked for them.

Roger Latham ran the Game Commission’s Wildlife Research Division, which made him the state’s own expert on the animal the state was famous for. In February 1953, he published a piece in Pennsylvania Game News under the title “Too Many, Too Long” and told the readership that most of our deer range is ruined, eaten to death by the herd itself, while the herd starved on it.

Look at where that ran. Not a newspaper, not a rival magazine, the agency’s own publication mailed to the men whose license dollars paid his salary, telling them the thing they’d been taught to protect was the thing doing the damage. A byline in that magazine wasn’t a credit. It was authority arriving in a man’s kitchen with his mail.

>> [music] >> He’d have seen the sentence in proof before anyone else did. He knew whose table it was landing on. And notice what his argument did to the old bargain. Nothing about a man’s marksmanship changes how much browse a mountain can grow. Skill was never the variable. Restraint wasn’t either, not anymore.

Because the restraint that saved the herd in 1907 was the same restraint now killing the ground under it. The hunters counted antlers. Latham counted stems. The argument he started [music] did not end with him. They fired him in August. His first column as outdoor editor of the Pittsburgh Press ran on the 18th of August 1957.

The Game Commission fired him on the 21st. Three days. Whatever was said inside that building, the record doesn’t hand it over, and I’m not going to invent it for you. His offense was arguing that Pennsylvania needed to kill more does. That sounds like a technicality, and it wasn’t. [music] Every hunter over 40 in 1957 had grown up inside the bargain.

Leave the does alone, and the deer will come back. Latham was telling them the bargain had expired, and that [music] the proof was standing in the woods where they hunted every fall. He wasn’t asking them to change a rule. He was asking them to admit that the discipline that made them good men had become the thing doing harm. There’s also this.

The commission ran on the money of the people he was contradicting. Telling a license buyer to want fewer deer is telling your own customer he’s been wrong his whole life. Then the reversal nobody advertised. Doe seasons came back that same year, and Pennsylvania never lost them again. Glenn Bowers, another commission biologist, went on making the same case from inside the building that a heavier harvest years earlier would have left better ground behind.

The biologists lost the jobs and won the season. So, who was actually deciding? Which brings us to the two paragraphs. Take the 1905 statute and set the 1964 order beside it. Same state, same agency, same shelf of bound law, 59 years apart. The first makes buckshot out of crime. A man who put nine pellets into the woods at a deer was breaking the law of the Commonwealth because a single aimed bullet was the standard of an honest kill and the state had written that standard into the code.

The second requires buckshot in a designated area of southeastern Pennsylvania and prohibits the rifle in the counties around Philadelphia. The same body outlawed a thing and then ordered it. And the reason on the record isn’t the reason in the memory. Everyone in those counties remembers 1964 as the year they took our rifles for safety.

What the surviving commission record gives is herd reduction. Too many deer in a corner of the state filling up with people with extra antlerless days handed over in the very same decision. Not a punishment, a trade. [music] Fewer choices for more deer. As for what the commissioners themselves believe they were doing, no words of theirs have surfaced.

Calphes left a memoir. Latham left 22 years of columns. The men who actually banned the rifle left a line in a timeline. What that trade did to those counties took a generation to show. The land was moving under everybody’s feet. Farms outside Philadelphia became subdivisions. Wood lots became the backs of housing plans and the deer moved into the seams and thrived there because a suburb is an excellent place to be a deer and a difficult place to be a rifle.

The old limit had been a judgement about a man. Could he shoot? Would he wait? Did he know what stood behind the animal? The new limit was a line on a survey map, and it didn’t care who you were or what you could do. Picture a father in Chester County handing down a rifle to a son who cannot legally carry it after deer anywhere he lives.

He can drive 2 hours north and it’s legal. Same rifle, same man, same season. The county line does the deciding. [music] Allegheny County was eventually folded into the same regime out west, though exactly when isn’t clear in the accessible record. What is clear is that entire families in these counties came up shotgun only, and their [music] sense of what a deer gun even is has got formed inside a rule they never had a vote on.

Ask them why and every one of them has an answer ready. They all thought they knew why. The why had a number attached to it and nobody looked at the number. So, let’s look at it. Pennsylvania has counted hunting-related shooting incidents since 1915, [music] which gives it one of the longest continuous records of its kind anywhere in the country.

In 1960, 4 years before the rifle came off the table in the southeast, the rate was 53.56 incidents per 100,000 licensed hunters. In 2023, it was 1.52, 13 incidents among 854,081 licensed hunters. That isn’t an improvement, that’s a collapse. Here’s the part that matters for our argument. The commission credits that drop close to 80% to hunter education, which began in 1959, and to fluorescent orange.

Not to restricting what kind of firearm a man carried into the woods. Picture a church basement in 1961, folding chairs, a borrowed projector, a volunteer instructor holding an unloaded gun, and saying the same four sentences he’ll go on to say 10,000 more times. And the collapse happened everywhere. >> [music] >> It happened in Bucks County where the rifle was banned.

It happened up in Potter County >> [music] >> where the rifle never stopped being legal for a single season. The two lines on the graph look like each other. If the rifle wasn’t the thing that changed, what exactly was the ban still doing? The argument eventually stopped being about deer at all and became about trust and it moved [music] indoors.

By 2015, Pennsylvania held a distinction nobody had asked for. It was the only state in the country that wouldn’t let a hunter use a semi-automatic rifle for anything. Not deer, not coyotes, not groundhogs in a hay field. 49 states had looked at the same firearm and reached the opposite conclusion. That fall, a House committee took testimony.

Kim Stolfer, speaking for the Allegheny County Sportsmen’s League, asked the lawmakers to cast off the mindset of bureaucratic prohibition. Representative Rick Saccone had a bill to legalize the rifles and let the commission sort out the details. Representative Curtis Sunny had a narrower one, coyotes and foxes and groundhogs first.

The commission’s executive director, R. Matthew Ho, told the room not to expect deer to follow quickly. Picture a man who runs a sportsmen’s league reading testimony into a microphone, testimony he wrote at his own kitchen table the night before in a building where nobody hunts for a living. In November 2016, the governor signed.

Pennsylvania became the 49th state to permit semi-automatic rifles for hunting, half a century after the southeast lost the bolt gun. Then the commission voted and the vote was not the one anyone expected. In January 2017, the Board of Game Commissioners gave preliminary approval to semi-automatic rifles across the board, small game and big game both.

In April, the same board took big game back out. The rule-making language is dry and it is exact. The commission had proposed extending the use to big game and removed it based upon public comment. Behind [snorts] that phrase set a survey of a random sample of 4,000 Pennsylvania hunters and a clear majority of them said no.

Board officials acknowledged that their research did not show significant problems with the rifles. The president commissioner, Brian Hoover, put it as plainly as it can be put, “We listen to our hunters.” Read that sequence twice. The evidence was in the room. The restriction survived anyway on opinion. That is the same shape as 1964, a limit on the tool justified by something other than what the tool had actually done.

But, the hands holding it had switched. In 1964, it was officials restricting hunters. In 2017, it was hunters pulled and counted restricting themselves and the officials wrote it down and moved to the next item. [music] The removed clause is still visible in the amended [snorts] text sitting inside its brackets, big game lifted out of a sentence that used to contain it.

Latham never saw how any of it landed. He died in 1979 in Switzerland photographing wildlife, 22 years into a newspaper job he took because a state agency didn’t want his conclusions in its own magazine. In the southeast, three generations of hunters grew up without a deer rifle. That isn’t a figure of speech.

It has a body attached. When the commission finally reopened the question in 2021, the language it used to explain the appeal of a shorter range cartridge said the quiet part in administrative English, “Less recoil, an attractive option for smaller framed hunters. Which is a careful way of saying that for 57 years, a great many 15-year-olds in Bucks and Delaware counties took the punishment of a heavy shotgun load on a shoulder that wasn’t ready for it because the law in their county left them nothing gentler to shoot. Then

there are the men who fought the semi-auto ban and lost, not to a bureaucrat, to a survey of their own neighbors. Both sides thought they were defending the same tradition. The agency changed its mind, the hunters didn’t. How do you win an argument against the people you hunt with? The rifle did come back, sort of.

On April 10th, 2021, the Game Commission proposed allowing straight-walled centerfire cartridges inside most of the special regulations areas. It adopted the change that July and it took effect in September. The Commission’s own explanation is worth hearing because it’s a concession wearing a lab coat. A straight-walled round sheds velocity fast.

Its useful reach is comparable to a rifled shotgun inside a couple hundred yards. It’s steadier than the alternatives those counties had and it kicks less, which amounts to this. You may have a rifle in Bucks County now, provided it behaves like a shotgun. Philadelphia County stayed closed to centerfire. So did Ridley Creek and Tyler State Parks.

And buckshot, the load the 1964 order required, is no longer permitted in the special regulations areas at all. Pennsylvania outlawed buckshot for deer in 1905, >> [music] >> mandated it in 1964, and outlawed it again more than a century after the first time. And if there was ever a single consistent principle running through those three decisions, nobody has written it down.

It is still illegal to carry a bottleneck cartridge after deer in six Pennsylvania counties. >> [music] >> 62 years on, that prohibition is still in the code. Bucks, Chester, [music] Delaware, Montgomery, Philadelphia, Allegheny, semi-automatic rifles remain closed to big game statewide, and a state senator has a bill to allow them with a three-round limit, which is the 1905 argument in a new suit.

How much should a man be trusted to hold at once? In July 2025, the state repealed its Sunday hunting ban for roughly 850,000 licensed hunters. A record 1.3 million antlerless licenses went out for the 2025 to 2026 season. Chronic wasting disease is rewriting the math all over again. Kalbfus’s rule built the herd that made his rule impossible.

Latham was right about the range and wrong about how fast men will accept being told so. Neither of them got to be wrong in a small way. A gun counter in Montgomery County before first light. A kid buys a box of straight-walled cartridges that have only been legal in his county since 2021. A rifle round deliberately shaped to act like the shotgun load that replaced the rifle round his great-grandfather was legally required to use in 1905.

On the wall behind the register hangs a rifle he still can’t carry after deer. Two men at the end of the counter are arguing about semi-automatics. One says, “Trust the man.” The other says, “Look at where you’re standing.” Neither one has read either law. If you’ve got a side in that argument, leave it in the comments.

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