Good: No pins, no hold-over, no guesswork.
Bad: It takes a little time, and if the shooting lane isn’t all clear, you could get a wrong rangefinder reading.
Ugly: Tech like that makes everybody feel like a Genius. It’s just like shooting a rifle. Except most people are not actually competent marksmen shooting a scoped rimfire at 50 yards off-hand. And of course there’s the hang-time. So OK, it’s not EXACTLY like shooting a rifle, but you’ve got to split the hairs a couple different ways before you can argue that it’s any different from a crossbow... with an onboard rangefinder...
Is it a game changer, compared to what we had to work with 30 years ago? Of course it is. So is a good rangefinder, actually.
Question is, What game do we want Archery season to be about?
Time was, they called it The Hard Way. Now it’s arguably the easiest way of all, outside of a high fence.
Now, correct me if I’m mistaken, but I believe electronic devices mounted on your bow are still illegal in Colorado.
Honestly, in places where there’s a whitetail problem, I don’t give a rip. The objective is to kill as many as possible, and whatever makes that happen more efficiently is (while not very sporting) probably a good thing. Although I still have some very serious misgivings about bait piles and CWD.
But CO Elk???
The whole idea was to impose a gut check. You either think you’re good enough to get it done with a bow (or you’re desperate enough to escape the pressure that you don’t care) or you take your chances in rifle with all the other knuckleheads.
I made a conscious decision 30 years ago that I would rather take my chances with a roundball muzzleloader or a stickbow than put up with the insanity that reigns during the rifle seasons. The trade-off was efficiency for solitude and a low-pressure environment. It’s all gone now. Everybody here bitches about how crowded it’s gotten, and they also say that they would never consider hunting rifle season because by then the rut is over. So really, compounds and rangefinders have made archery season everybody’s best bet for filling a tag.
And JMO, that’s Crap. The season that used to be the greatest possible challenge is now the easy way out, and instead of a few people hunting in ways where they would very rarely cross paths, we are now looking at a lottery-only proposition across much of the state because Archery has gotten too easy to pass up.
Everybody feels entitled to complain about how crowded things have gotten, but nobody’s willing to look in the mirror and recognize themselves as The Problem, because they’re all so Entitled. Enact a ban on rangefinders and the whole overcrowding issue during archery season will go away overnight. Guaranteed.
And that’s such a “controversial” position that I can pretty well guarantee that this post is going to be deleted. Which is a Royal Car-load of BS.
