When I lived in southern Illinois in 1994-95, I noticed that whitetail deer were all over the place - literally. I went back to college at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and the deer would walk onto our campus and eat from feed barrels. If you were dumb enough to drive down a country road at night there, you would see hundreds lining the road, their foolish eyes reflecting your headlight-glare back at you. All you could do is pray that none of them would run out in front of your car. Now that the deer population has grown to 25 million nationwide (from 10 million in 1990) and 700,000 to 800,000 in the state of Illinois, whitetail deer have become the deadliest game animal in the United States, killing 100+ people a year in 1.5 million vehicle-deer collisions costing $1.1 billion in losses, according to the Insurance Information Institute's reporting of their sister body, the IIHS.

I knew some hunters in southern Illinois - the state would issue one deer tag a year to them. In Illinois, you can't use a rifle to hunt deer, so you've got to use a shotgun. This limits you to a 50-100 yard shot. This is pretty close; male deer have a terrific sense of smell and will stay outside the range of shotgun-restricted hunters. Many of my friends would report that they would hit more deer with their cars than they were legally allowed to take in season!

All of this insanity came about as a result of the leftist control by Chicago over the downstate's gun owners and hunters. Illinois is really a red state ruthlessly dictated by one massive, blue metropolis, and the citizens of Chicago could care less that downstate Illinoisans have to deal with things like this, from ABC News:

"The Illinois Department of Transportation said there were 25,660 vehicle accidents involving deer in 2003, up from 23,647 reported in 2002."

The State of Illinois forces gun owners to possess a Firearms Owners I.D. card to purchase ammunition or buy a gun - I was looking at the U.S. Constitution the other day and saw no mention of any card required for citizens to be permitted their gun ownership rights. How would you react to some phony-baloney state government requirement that you apply for permission to peaceably assemble so that your group can criticize the government, or for you to be a practicing Catholic or atheist? How would you like it if you had to register with some government body for a permit not to be a slave, or to seek permission to vote simply because you're a woman? Ridiculous - and unconstitutional, too.

Why are the citizens of Illinois permitting their idiotarian state government to mismanage wildlife in the southern part of the state, endangering the lives and property of the citizens, and the welfare of the poor animals (numbers ever-increasing) competing for limited resources there? I suspect that it is because the state government in Chicago has some very oddball fears of gun owners and hunting, and that the farmer's lobbies (farmers lose an unspeakable quantity of corn to deer) are unable to defeat the anti-gun special interest groups in Springfield, all because of the clout of the corrupt political machine that got Jack Kennedy "elected" illegally to the presidency by "voting early and often." Here's a quote from the Illinois Farm Bureau: