A big change may be coming to deer hunting in Minnesota.

“I hunt in southern Minnesota,” declares Rob Driesten, the managing editor of Plymouth-based Outdoor News. “If you ask me, ‘Would you like to use a rifle?’ I probably would.”  

The northern part of the state allows hunters to use any legal firearms they want; however, in the south and west, only shotguns with slugs, muzzleloaders and handguns are allowed.

“The shotgun zone is demarcated by a line that runs roughly from Moorhead down to about Taylors Falls,” explains Leslie McInenly, wildlife populations and regulations program manager with the Department of Natural Resources (DNR). “It was established decades ago with the intent to make it a little more difficult to hunt deer in open landscape.”

That shotgun-only zone rule has been on the books since 1942 — a time when the deer harvest was about 77,000.

The DNR says that number has grown to more than 170,000.

Eighty-three years later, the rule is still in effect.

“It’s kind of a relic of the past,” says Jared Mazurek, executive director of the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association. “It was originally implemented, a lot of people think it was for safety issues, safety concerns but it was originally implemented to limit the deer harvest.”

Driesten says times and technology have changed.  

“When the law went into place, the effective range of a slug, through a smooth bore barrel, was 40-50-60 yards,” Driesden says. “Now, with rifle barrels and sabot slugs, it’s like a couple of hundred yards.”

But for some in southern Minnesota, there are still concerns.  

“There’s folks who live down there who are concerned about the safety issue with longer-range firearms, like centerfire rifles,” Driesten notes. “Hit livestock, hit a person, whatever it might be, because the range of a centerfire rifle is so much farther, like a mile, compared to even a rifle slug barrel, is going to be a couple of hundred yards.”

A bill making its way through the Minnesota Senate would allow hunting rifles to be used statewide.

Sen. Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, is the co-sponsor of the bill to abolish the shotgun-only zone.

“Rifles, when hunting with them in a normal hunting position parallel to the ground, have been shown to be safer, having a smaller danger zone than shotguns,” he says.

The DNR says allowing rifles for deer hunting and overturning the shotgun-only rule in southern Minnesota could also thin the excess deer population.

“We have issues with overabundant deer in the state, particularly in the southern regions,”  McInenly says. “There’s technological changes, that it doesn’t really have a meaningful wildlife management purpose anymore.”

The proposed bill would allow individual counties to opt-in as shotgun-only areas.

A report by Remington Ammunition found that Minnesota, New Jersey and Massachusetts are the only states where rifles can’t be widely used for deer hunting.

Drazkowski hopes that will change if the bill passes.

“It would hopefully kind of reinvigorate hunting in southern Minnesota,” he says.