Former Soil Conservation Service employee and longtime writer Mat Taylor offers his outdoors column for Dispatch Record readers. He can be contacted at (254) 518-2262 or via e-mail at mntaylor@wildblue.net. At a recent Kempner City Council meeting, members discussed rules for the new Sylvia Tucker Memorial Park. One point of discussion was prohibiting hunting and the discharge of weapons in the park.

A question was raised on how to write a rule that concerns persons who hold a concealed handgun permit.

Texas, along with most other states, allows citizens who qualify, pass a background check and demonstrate proficiency with a handgun to obtain a concealed handgun license. They then may carry a concealed pistol on their person, except in areas where guns are not allowed.

When CHL laws were first proposed, many anti-gun people claimed the country would revert back to the Old West days with increased gun fights and a jump in crimes and murders. Instead, the exact opposite has happened.

To back this up, I recently viewed on the Internet the latest Federal Bureau of Investigation data. The FBI recently issued its preliminary 2009 crime report, which shows that the number of murders in the first half of 2009 decreased 10 percent in the United States compared to the first half of 2008.

If the trend continues for the remainder of 2009, it will be the single greatest one-year decrease in the number of murders since 1960, the earliest year for which national data are available through the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The report also showed the percapita murder rate for 2009 will be 51 percent lower than the all-time high recorded in 1991, and will be the lowest rate since 1963. The FBI will release final figures for 2009 later this year.

The murder numbers and rates have decreased as the number of guns sold and the number of citizens with CHLs has increased.

For the past 15 months, firearms, ammunition and large ammunition magazines have been sold in record numbers. The most commonly purchased firearms in 2009 were the ones gun-control supporters most want banned: AR-15s, similar semi-automatic rifles and handguns designed for defense.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation already estimates record ammunition sales in 2009, with the most popular being .223 Remington, 7.62X39, 9mm and other calibers favored for defense purposes.

Speaking of guns sales, the FBI’s National Criminal Background Check System reported 1,407,155 checks in December 2009, ranking the month in the top five for most NICS checks of all time.

The figure, while being a 7.6 percent decrease from the 1,523,426 checks conducted in December 2008 -- the beginning stage of an ongoing surge in firearms and ammunition sales -- is an increase of 14.4 percent over checks in December 2007.

Background checks for 2009 totaled 14,033,824, an increase of 10.4 percent over the same time period the previous year. The total number of background checks reported since the beginning of NICS is 110,017,832.

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If you are into wintertime fishing and would like to catch a lunker largemouth bass, you might want to travel west or south -- specifically to O.H. Ivie Lake east of San Angelo or Falcon Reservoir near Zapata in deep South Texas.

Last month, Bryan Aubin of Zapata landed a 14.4-pound bass while fishing at Falcon. He caught the fish in six feet of water with a watermelon red lizard.

Also last month, O.H. Ivie produced two lunker bass in less than a week: a 13.1-pound bass caught on an X-lock jig in 25 feet of water and a 14.02-pound largemouth, also caught in deep water.

The bass were entered in the TPWD Sharelunker Program, in which a legally caught 13-pound or larger bass from Texas waters may be submitted to TPWD for use in a selective breeding program at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center. Offspring are stocked in public waters across the state in an attempt to increase the overall size and growth rate of largemouth bass in Texas.