People who are only familiar with pistol ammunition, who have never gone deer hunting, have no comprehension of the sheer power of even low-end centerfire rifle ammunition. Even the (wrongly) "disrespected" (I hate that non-word) 30-30 has an incredible amount of power when compared to even "high power" pistol ammunition. You have to be careful with bullet placement. It's not too hard to ruin a lot of meat in a nice deer. The bullet can easily go the entire length of the deer, destroying a tunnel of meat several inches in diameter, shattering bone as it goes, and driving the bone fragments into even more venison.
And a .30-'06 is a lot more powerful than a 30-30. A modest FMJ round will go clean though a 30 inch hardwood tree, and keep on going, with plenty of "oomph" left in it. (I've done this experiment myself with my fifty buck 109 year old Mosin Nagant, which has pretty much the same ballistics as a .30-'06.)
Make no mistake. If they ban ammunition that can "pierce body armor", you can kiss your deer rifle goodbye. It'll be shotgun-only zone from sea to shining sea.
Now, I've hunted deer with a shotgun. It was all I could afford. I had to be close, which translated into sneaking way into the swamp and waitin for the yayhoos up from The Big City to drive the deer in to where I was quietly waiting (and freezing).
It also meant a not very easy hunt, for two reasons. One, shotgunning just isn't that easy. It might have helped if I had a "real" slug/buckshot barrel, instead of my "normal" barrel with the bead at the tip, but even so, there's an inherent disadvantage to using a scattergun vs. a rifle.
It also meant dragging the deer a long distance over very nasty ground. Up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down... gets old after a quarter mile, and it gets real old past that point -- and that's when I was young and healthy. Swampland -- even "dry swamp" land -- ain't like the green down at the countryclub. When you hear about hunters dying of heart attacks during deer season, now you know why.
When I hunted with a rifle, I was on nice, open, private land, and there wasn't much of a "drag" at all, since the truck could come up within a few feet of the carcass.
Shotgunning for deer is like noisy bowhunting. You get a bit more range, sure, but it's not that much more. Sure, there's the exception to the rule, but IMO they're rare, and there's a big element of luck involved. You don't go for a 100 yard shot with much of a reasonable confidence of a clean kill -- let alone longer range -- and it's not good to ruin game, cause an innocent animal to suffer needlessly, and then go and die way deep in the swamp to become food for maggots and coyotes.
It looks like that's where they're trying to take us. Big game hunting will be restricted to buckshot-only.
IMO this ought to serve as a wake-up call to the "they'll never come for my deer rifle" crowd, and I suggest using it as such. They're notorious for not giving a rat's ass about increasingly draconian laws, because they never thought their hobby was threatened. "Niemoller's Law" applies to them, and it's high time they realized it. This piece of legislation may just do the trick WRT to getting their attention. In fact, if it doesn't, then nothing will, short of a sale at the local sporting goods shop: "Get fifty dollars off the purchase of a new shotgun when turning in your prohibited deer rifle."
ALL my guns are for self-defense, most are best suited for that specific purpose and I target practice a great deal with them to that end, I also hunt with some of them occasionally.
Grim days ahead for "Longarm." Hard choices.