Washington lawmakers are setting their sights on legislative goals for the session that convenes in a month.

One fitting target is a proposal to restore hunting limitations that once applied to minors but were removed in 1994 for reasons that have grown hazy. Whatever the reasons, that shortsighted action should be reversed. No doubt Pamela Almli’s family would concur.

Almli died in August while hiking in Skagit County. She had bent to put something in her backpack, and a 14-year-old hunter, using his scope to peer at her through the fog, mistook her for a bear and shot her.

The boy was accompanied not by a parent, guardian or any other adult, but by his 16-year-old brother.

Hunting is a healthy and wholesome activity, and untold numbers of sportsmen learned to love it and the outdoors as children. Ideally, they were tutored by responsible adults who instructed them in safety as well as skill and sportsmanship. They spent years watching, learning, maturing and proving themselves before they were ready to hunt without adult supervision.

Such youngsters learned hunting the way so many learn to ride a bicycle, relying at first on a parent’s steadying hand while gradually refining their balance and readiness to go it alone.

If anything, a child in the woods with a lethal weapon should receive even more adult guidance. A skinned knee is one thing, a dead hiker quite another.

At one time Washington law recognized that. It required that hunters 14 and younger be accompanied by an adult. A comprehensive law meant to reduce youth violence eliminated that provision, however, although no one around Olympia now seems to remember exactly why.

But a bigger mystery surrounds this issue: Why have lawmakers ignored subsequent appeals from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife to reinstate the requirement?

For good reason, the state has imposed limits in recent years on young motorists whose licenses used to confer all the same driving privileges at 16 that any adult would have. Today, teen drivers must spend time getting comfortable at the wheel without the distractions posed by a carful of their contemporaries.

Surely, the reasoning behind that sensible legislative theory is just as suitable for hunting. If anything, age 14 – the threshold that existed before 1994 – is too young to be hunting alone. Legislators, who recognized that young drivers must learn how to share the highways with others, even after they’re licensed, should also insist that young hunters know how to safely share the woods with other sportsmen and recreationists.