Michigan went with allowing the straight wall cartridges no more than 1.8" long and at least 35cal. Which effectively rules out the stock 45/70. Enterprising fellas just shorten the case from 2.05" to 1.8" and leave more of the bullet hanging out and shoot the exact same loads. I don't bother. I did buy a single shot 44 magnum which takes care of my needs when I hunt deer in the southern part of the state.
The funny part about Michigan rules is the "shotgun only" zone was only for deer season. You could use anything you wanted on varmints and predators, except during deer season. So it was always legal to use your 338 Lapua for whacking that groundhog in Grandma's back yard just so long as your town/city/burg didn't have a no hunting/no firearm discharge law.
Wisconsin was the same way, first shotgun only, then muzzle loader, then handgun for deer, but any rifle you wanted for varmints or fur.
But over the years deer hunting changed, radically. In the 60's when I started, we had only had deer in the southern half of the State for 20 years. Their numbers exploded as they adapted to farmland. On Opening Day, my brother and I would amuse ourselves by counting the seconds between shots that we could hear. Most years it was after noon before we could count higher than 1000-8! It must have sounded like a war, especially to the non hunting public. Everybody and their brother was out to get their venison. Every farmer and all of their extended family and friends grabbed their duck and pheasant shotgun, a pocket full of Foster slugs, and sallied forth.
Come Monday, the first topic of conversation at school or work was, "Didja get yer buck?" We'd see 80 deer on Opening Day running though our 18 acres marsh before a scrawny, 1 1/2 year old six point buck with busted antlers would drag his exhausted butt within range and the pump guns would open up.
Then as incomes rose, the guys that had put slug barrels on their shotguns started to buy, "Huntin' Land." Farms that used to let the neighbors put on drives got sold to hunters and posted. Farmers leased out huntin' rights. Drives became a thing of the past, heck, getting down out of your stand, (Wisconsin finally allowed tree stands), was bad form as you might scare the big buck off your land onto the neighbor's.
Seemed like nobody needed the meat anymore. People started paying butcher shops to process their deer. Guys talked about turning their whole deer into sausage and hot sticks, "Cuz their wives and kids don't like that shtuff anyway."
Now Opening Day you hear a shot hear and a shot there but few and far between. And well placed, scope sighted, rifle single shots at that. Never hear a fusillade as in the past. Most shots are directed at a down ward angle and the deer has to be a "shooter."
If I lived in Southern Minnesota, Iowa, or Lower Michigan, I would direct my legislators and DNR to look at Wisconsin and see that rifles are not the dangerous 4 mile killer that they fear. They are precision instruments, now typically scoped, fired by Hunter Safety graduates at well identified targets by hunters that pulled their 20 thousand dollar UTVs to the $3,000.00 an acre hunting land, behind a $70,000.00 pick up truck. Yessir, deer huntin' has changed.
