Good stuff.
Correct me if I am wrong here, but if it was limited to land owners and guests, wouldn't that make it legal for everyone hunting on private land? Technically, if you are nunting on someone's land and you have permission, aren't you a guest?
Yes it would make it legal for hunting on private land since you would either be the landowner or guest of landowner. Otherwise you would be trespassing. However, not everyone has access to private land to hunt on so you are actually just providing extra benefits to those people. It would be just as easy to remove the restriction that adding the several sentences last year's bill was adding to the regulations.
I've never hunted on public land, but would hunting unsuppressed be better for safety since you could have a better idea of those around you? I tend to think that it would be better to be suppressed but maybe that is the argument the senator is using with this language.
This is the biggest misconception on suppressors. Suppressors do not completely silence your rifle. There will still be an audible report and sonic crack for standard ammunition. If someone is using subsonic ammo, then yes the sound will be significantly less but there will still be some noise and the hunter is risking just wounding the animal and not killing it. Unsafe hunters will still shoot at things they do not see or know what it really is and will not follow safe hunting rules. Not using suppressors will not automatically change the unsafe habits of others.
Maybe with the landowner/guest rule, he is trying to define it as illegal to use a suppressor if you don't have permission to hunt. So, if someone is poaching and the have a suppressor, they are using the suppressor illegally. Maybe he is trying to tack on more laws against those not using it properly.
If you are poaching, you are poaching. It doesn't matter if you use a suppressor or not as you are already breaking the law. Right not it is illegal to use a suppressor at all. Allowing landowners and guests to use suppressors to hunt still does not make it legal to poach, with or without a suppressor. I don't think poachers are going to go through the cost and 6 month wait to purchase a suppressor. They will either use a rifle or crossbow and hope they don't get caught.
The reasoning he used for the way he worded the bill last year was the people who have lived out in the rural areas and have always shot predators messing with their livestock are now getting encroached by new neighborhoods. When the neighborhood pops up, people in them call the sheriff to report gun shots even though it is perfectly legal for the person to be shooting as long as they are not shooting at people's houses or damaging someone else's property.