city limits is a big part of the answer - every city has different rules

if you are outside of city limits, I have not seen a county that prevents you from shooting a bow in a safe manner.

You can get arrested for recklessly driving your lawnmower. Safe use of backstop, etc., matters.

The "discharge of a firearm" doesn't apply from my conversations with Sherrifs - which I have asked several times this question.

It is hard to resist that first time when you have a deer almost in range and you know you have never made the shot in practice, but you think, "I can do it if I am just lucky and what a great story it will be to tell." Hopefully you miss. Sometimes you stick the deer in an odd body part and it hobbles off to tell all his friends and your neighbors what a fool you are. Not that it has ever happened to me.

Practice shooting at a little paper plate, the type they serve cake on at kids parties.

Practice in the same conditions, clothes, location, and angle that you are going to try to really shoot a deer from.

It sounds simple, but I asked a trainer at the gym what I could do to improve my vertical jump in an effort to try to duck the basketball one more time. It has been 13 years. The trainer looked at me and said, "remember when you were 15 and you tried to dunk every day until you couldn't jump anymore? There is no better way to practice that to go out and try to dunk over and over and over. Funny, I haven't once "tried" to dunk because I know I can't. What strange logic we develop as we get older.

Practice the shot you intend to take.

I do not have one - yet. Why, cell phone signal issue. Wireless internet access issue. Charge per photo sent over cell network can get very expensive quickly. If money is not an object and at least someone can "reset" when/if necessary, here are the companies that I have talked to who seemed like they new what they were talking about:

Tommy, tommy@granderiver.net I see him at the Texas Deer Association shows and at the 4H Shogun Shooting Sports competition in San Antonio. They have very high quality equipment and operate an internet hosting company in South Texas.

I just met these guys this summer for the first time at the Texas Wildlife Association banquet, their name was www.timekeeperssecurity.com and they had an equally impressive solution with a strong security background.

My experience shooting a crossbow is that the opportunity for the deer to jump the string starts to happen when taking shots over 25-30 yards. I strongly believe the same rule applies to compound bows. 

How much juice is behind the bow or crossbow has little to do with the distance of the shot you should take. For example, whether you are shooting a .243 or a .338, you still have to take into account the distant you are comfortable hitting a 4-6in circle, environmental variables such as wind, the type of animal you are about to shoot, and the consequences of a bad shot. The same applies to archery. Just because my friend can shoot a coke can at 50 yards 4 out of 5 shots with a compound bow doesn't mean he should take that shot on a trophy buck - does that make sense?

With my recurve bow I stay inside 15 yards. When using a .12 gauge slug I don't take shots at deer over 50 yards. With a .44 mag not scoped, I don't take shots over 25 yards. With the .308 bolt action and a Leupold VX-7 scope I am staying inside 250 yards, even though I practice shooting clay pidgeons at 400 yards.

If it is a hog or coyote I will take any shot at any distance with any legal weapon.

All of these methods of harvest have an effective range greater than my comfort and skill level. So what. Learn your weapon. Learn your species. 

Some traditional archers think compound bows are as much cheating as many compound hunters think of crossbows. Why not argue about shooting rifles open sight versus using optics? My grandfather hunted with a .30-30 lever action open sight rifle. Does that make him better or worse?

This is from an article I posted on the site about 2 years ago:

A common topic among landowners is white-tail gene pool management.   When talking about the management of a deer herd’s genetics there are basically two schools of thought.  One is the genetics management strategy developed and championed by TPWD and their research station on the Kerr wildlife management area.   This strategy, based on half a century of controlled environment research (their only test subjects have been deer who literally spend their entire lives in a small pin), emphasizes the importance of killing all spikes- no matter what.  Their reasoning for killing spikes stems from research showing that if two deer are born in the same year and one is a spike and the other is a 4 point the spike will always be inferior to the 4 point, which is true, with pin raised deer. 

The other school of thought comes from one of the, no, the greatest deer manager of all time, Al Brothers.  In a time when deer populations were managed like cattle and shooting does was thought to be a cardinal sin, Mr. Brothers applied his real world experiences from the field and co-authored a book called, Producing Quality White-tails, changing the way we look at deer management today.  His management strategy was based on 3 principals: letting bucks grow old, planting food plots, and keeping buck doe ratios as close to 1:1 as possible.   What Mr. Brothers strategy has over the archaic dogma that TPWD is now using to set harvest regulations in parts of Texas, is that his strategy can actually be applied by ranchers, hunters, and deer managers to create deer populations with more bucks and bigger racks.  Until the day that deer walk out from the woods with their age, weight, and a record of what they have been eating and will eat in future seasons tattooed on their backs, the indiscriminate killing of young deer, thought to be inferior, is not practical for managing deer genetics, unless of course these deer live their entire lives in a variable controlled pin, living off an ample ration of pedigree.  If you are managing an average Texas lease, between hunter error and environmental variation, there are just too many variables too implore the Kerr WMA’s harvest strategy on your ranch.

Tyler Morning Telegraph reported the following response to the above article:

Yeah I'd do it all ASAP.  As long as you do and get it on ice right after shooting and quartering you'll be fine.  You can also just drive it in to most towns and hang it in a processors cooler.  Most towns have a processor these days.

Allen

Gold Medal for sure Danny.  You got my blood pumping just reading about it.  I know exactly how you feel.  There are many more years to find that special elk up there in the mountains.  I would suggest hunting as much as possible with your bow.  Everytime I go out with mine I learn something new to improve my shooting.  The more animals you shoot then the more comfortable you'll feel --- especially when a great big bull elk is walking straight toward you!  I also try to not shoot at anything more than 12 or 15 yards from me just cause i've heard one story after another about "bow wounds" and I think the closer you are the better chance you'll have of killing them (and finding them).

There is always next year!

Allen