Southern Michigan Can Hunt With a Real Rifle Once Again

For most of my life, the rifle I kept at deer camp was illegal to hunt with at home.

That’s now over.

On May 13, the Natural Resources Commission ended the Limited Firearms Deer Zone. Starting Sept. 12, you can use any legal firearm across the Lower Peninsula. Bottleneck cartridges included. If it’s bigger than a .22 rimfire, it’s legal statewide.

The old line ran from Muskegon, through northern Kent County, over toward Bay City. South of it, you hunted slugs from a shotgun or used straight-walled rifles. North of it, you hunted like the rest of the country.

I grew up on the wrong side of that line. Home for me is Kent County. Camp is in Big Rapids, four generations of the same woods, and the lever guns in the corner were never a question up there. They were a question as soon as you drove south.

The shotgun zone dates to 1948, when southern Michigan finally got a deer season again and the state decided a denser population meant you shouldn’t be shooting a rifle. For a few years it was buckshot only, then slugs. In 2014 the NRC turned the Shotgun Zone into the Limited Firearms Zone and let us shoot straight-wall cartridges, .35 caliber and up, in a case no longer than 1.80 inches.

That was a real change. The .450 Bushmaster and the .350 Legend sold well in southern Michigan, and other states copied the rule.

I already made the case that the .30-30 should be Michigan’s state firearm. Winchester built it for working men in 1895. There is one in almost every Up North cabin I’ve ever stayed in. There are several in my family’s. Until this fall, I could hunt deer camp with it and I could not hunt home with it.

Some people think this is a mistake.

A shop owner in Jenison told FOX 17 he doesn’t want a guy in Jamestown or Hopkins sitting behind a 7mm that can reach a thousand yards. That’s a fair fear if you live in a subdivision. Southern Michigan is not the U.P. Kent County is not empty timber.

The safety zone did not go away. You still can’t hunt within 150 yards of an occupied house, a barn, or a farm building without written permission. Townships can still restrict what you discharge, and a lot of them do.

It also does not turn every southern woodlot into a thousand-yard range. Most of us are still shooting across a bean field, a cut corn row, or a shooting lane we cut in years ago. The .30-30 that fed this state is a 150-yard rifle. So is a .35 Remington and the Model 94 in the corner.

The classic Michigan 30-30 was always legal up north at deer camp. Starting Sept. 12, it is legal at home too.