Judo points are billed as an "unloosable" practice point and when I shot trad archery, I rarely lost one. However with a compound, I have lost several because the amount of energy makes the bounces and deflections highly unpredictable. Case in point.....I was hunting a local municipal property last fall by paid draw and did a lot of still-hunting to get the feel of the zone I had access to. There were a lot of crop fields, but they were picked early in the season, so the sporadic woodlots became the focal points. On the way out late one morning in October, I scouted a two arce thicket of brush and trees and found a sandy "dish" on the NW end. Looked like a good place to take a judo shot, so I picked a weed in the bottom about 23 yards out and nailed it. However in my peripheral vision during follow-through, I caught the arrow bounce off to the left out of the dish. No problem.....picked bean field.....yeah, right. I walked a big chunk of field that morning with no success, then came back 2x to look again. Judo arrow went somewhere, but I never ran across it.....probably walked 25-30 acres of that field.
That is precisely the issue with the sad thread posted about the little gal being hit by a stray arrow down in Alabama. The shooter very likely had zero ill intent, but remains highly negligent for a deflection that resulted in serious bodily damage to a child from his shot. Once the bow is drawn and an arrow released, the end result is fully the responsibility of the shooter. No blaming the release or the nock or the string serving or Dloop or a flinch or whatever, every shot is accountable to the individual archer. No bow is a toy....recurve, longbow, selfbow, compound....all are deadly.
