Someone Finally Listened

Hunting license sales must be declining, because someone finally listened to the complaints from hunters that requiring social security numbers on license applications is just plain wrong.

Read more here:

Republican Sen. Rick Santorum says he will push for a bill that eliminates the need for recreational hunters to provide a Social Security number when applying for a state license.

The requirement was part of the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill. The idea, he says, was to have another tool to track down deadbeat parents.

Santorum’s Sportsmen’s Privacy Protection Act would eliminate that requirement.

The senator says the well-meaning regulation has resulted in hunters and anglers, who he says are often law-abiding citizens, providing information they don’t want to provide.

And, he says, the way the information is entered into databases makes it useless.

“We’re collecting Social Security numbers and they’re not really searchable,” Santorum said Friday at an appearance at the Eastern Sports and Outdoors Show at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex.

So all this time, the PGC has been collecting this information, and they have never been able to use it for its designed purpose.  That purpose, which was pretty silly to begin with, was to somehow catch what Santorum refers to as “deadbeat parents” but we all know that is just politician speech for “deadbeat dads.”  First, and I mean no harm here ladies, the overwhelming number of hunters are men.  So this requirement was really targeted to men.  It never worked.  The clerk at the local Wal-mart or sporting goods store had no way to check the number was valid, the licensee’s number wasn’t on any type of “no issue” list, or there was nothing in place to give the agent a way to refuse the license.

So all this collecting of data that had no bearing on hunting, but certainly has the potential of aiding the criminal element in increasing identity theft, may soon come to an end,

Until it does, my social security number hasn’t changed when it comes to hunting or fishing licenses: 111-11-1111.

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