Out of Range (The Anti Self-Defense lobby's war on shooting ranges)

If there were no paved roads, what would you do with your car? And if there were no places to shoot, how would you exercise your Second Amendment Rights? The right to keep and bear arms may have nothing to do with target shooting, hunting, or the shooting sports. But when a shooting range is shut down, shooters lose a place to learn safety, gun owners lose a place to practice, and in many cases, our firearm freedoms lose constituents, as one by one, shooters give up their sport.

All around America, as cities spread and surburbs sprawl, anti-gun forces are misusing noise nuisance lawsuits, zoning restrictions, ever-stricter environmental laws, and other bureaucratic restrictions to put shooting ranges on the run.

And although there's nothing we can do to stop the march of property development, there's a lot we can and we are doing to stop those who misuse laws and regulations to chase shooting ranges out of town or out of business.

Attacks on shooting ranges follow a familiar pattern. A standard strategy of attrition against gun owners and their rights is to make shooting require more time, trouble, expense, hassle, and red tape all the time. Lawsuits and the expenses of mounting a legal defense add costs. Zoning and environmental laws add red tape. Forcing a range to relocate further away from the residents who use it adds time, trouble, and expense to the shooting sports for them.

By chipping away at the places, times, and types of recreational shooting availible, those who distrust our freedoms can slowly strangle them out of our culture. It just becomes too much hassle. And it's happeningat too many shooting ranges today.

Grandfathers give it up, sell off the reloading equipment and relegate that old target gun to the back of a cobwebby closet. Young people lose the opprotunity to try shooting in a safe, supervised, and educational atmosphere. And slowly-the anti-gun crowd hopes- this uniquely American heritage is bred out of us, as forgotten as the long-gone family ancestors you wish you had written down when someone still remembered their names.

According to the International Fish and Wildlife Agencies, between 1996 and 1999, at least 30 shooting ranges were closed in 19 states. What many gun owners don't realize is that many of those ranges are built with the Pittman-Robinson excise taxes collected on sales of firearms and ammunition. Which means that when such a shooting range is closed, hunters and gun owners are being effectively robbed.

In Maryland, about half the ranges in the entire state have either closed or moved in the past 20 years. Nationally, 45 out of 50 state fish and game agencies reported a significant need for additional ranges.

Which makes sense. After all, the number of American shooters has taken off like a bullet, up 40 percent in the last five years, to 15.4 million in 2000, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates. But range space and time may not be keeping up.

Subdivision Strangulation

Development is one of the biggest pressures. According to the Department of Agriculture, between the late 1980's and the mid 1990's, the pace of development nationwide increased by 50 percent to 2.2 million acres per year. As cities expand into suburbs and farmland is soddled and paved, shooting ranges that have operated for decades are finding themselves in the middle of strip malls and cloverleafs surrounded by ex-urban newcomers unaccustomed and uncomfortable with the shooting sports.

East of Seattle, Microsoft's hometown of Redmond Washington, for example , is preparing to annex land were the Interlake Sporting Association has operated a range since the 1950's.

Once the Interlake range is swallowed up by Redmond, it's unclear what will happen, but it won't be cheap. If the range owners were to sell, that would threaten or complicate their non-profit status. They can't move since under a new law, the zoning classification required to build a shooting range no longer exists. And they can't shut down, because they'd have to reimburse the state for the matching grants they've received for range improvement. And those dollars are already invested in infrastructure for the range. "It's a catch-22," said Rick Raymond, the club's president. "They nickle and dime you to death. We've spent $60,000 to $70,000 so far just to comply with all their regulations and requirements.
But sometimes, that's just the point.

Lawyers, Guns and $$$$$$$$

Lawyers fought it out for two years before the developers dropped the suit. But even though the suit was dropped, Raymond estimates it cost the club $30,000-$40,000 in legal fees just to defend itself. And those fees wern't reimbursed.

"Our club almost went broke," said Jay Spitz, former president of the Naperville Sportsman's Club, about 20 miles west of Chicago, which found itself in a similar situation. They'd operated a trap-shooting range for shotgunners since 1948, but then a disgruntled neighbor enlisted an attorney and filed a federal suit claiming the range contaminated groundwater.

Illinois authorities already had an oversight role at the range. They'd never found any groundwater contamination. Still, as long as attorneys could tie the case up in court, the range couldn't operate. Thirty-Two months later, and $20,000 in legal fees poorer, the club was allowed to resume operations.

The bottom line: There was no groundwater contamination. The "wetland" amounted to a ditch. And the ditch was dry for months at a time. "That little piece of land of ground in Naperville had to be the most tested piece of ground on earth," said club member Arthur Jablonski. In the end, the club switched to steel shot ammunition, and trapshooting, though more pricey, went on as before.

In all too many cases, when plaintiffs try to close a range, their complaints are baseless and concerns off base. Safety is often invoked as a reason to close a range, and those who don't know about shooting ranges often think of them as dangerous places. But an extensive search of newspapers, magazines, adn newscasts suggests that accidental shootings at ranges are extraordinairily rare, surely rarer than the 10 to 20 accidental fatalities among high school and college football players each year.

Noise levels, too, are a common complaint, but at many ranges, they don't exceed the "background noise" at the site. A 4-H skeet field outside of Atlanta was under attack for noise, until one of the club's coaches took a sound meter and showed that the gunfire noise escaping the range measured lower than the traffic on a nearby road.

Unfortunatly, it's often not the noise, environment, or safety concerns that drive people to go after target ranges. It's just that they don't like firearms--and they see noise ordinances, zoning restrictions, and environmental laws in their arsenal(Dan: - VPC does this with shooting ranges).

NRA EFFORTS KEEP SHOOTERS ON THE LINE

Shooting ranges need protection. That much is clear. The NRA-ILA has worked with state legislatures for nearly a decade to protect ranges -- and with truely astonishing success. Over the past 7 years alone, 36 states have passed laws to protect shooting ranges from nuisance lawsuits. Now 44 states have range-protection laws.

Randy Kozuch, director of ILA State and Local affairs, said it's one of his primary priorities.

"Six states still don't have range protection laws, and we're going to do all we can to win it as many as we can," he said. "Young people and other shooters need ranges to learn safety. Recreational shooters need ranges to practice their sport. And in an indirect, but decisive way, our Second Amendment hinges on there being people who participate in the shooting sports, and places for them to do so. So we're going to see to it that the facilities they need aren't shut down for no good reason."

This is where NRA's range technical team really excels. Dave Willis, a former MArine Corps range coordinator, has assisted everyoen from the US Military to the US EPA on how to design, build, manage, and maintain safe, environmentally complaint shooting ranges. Today he serves in the NRA's Range Services Department which is emerging as the de facto national trend-setter for safe operation and sound design.

Jack Giordano, a former policeman for the Port Authority of New Jersey and New York, is the volunteer eastern region supervisor for the NRA's Range Technical Team. "We've saved a lot of ranges," he said. "I personally know of at least 10 ranges where if the NRA wern't involved, they would have been shut down."

For ranges facing frivolous lawsuits, the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund can also be a valuable ally. Over the years, the NRACDF has offered legal advice and even helped cover the costs of legal defense for many ranges across the country with its discretionairy funding.

Legally, legislatively, tactically, and technically, no one does more than the NRA to make sure shooting ranges are safely managed, soundly designed, welcolme contributors to communities across America. Shooting ranges have been a prime concern of this organization since its beginning, and we'll continue that tradition with pride in the positive public service that it is.

You are correct, but so am I: True, you can own them for a $200 tax on a $5 silencer, including an invasive background check, with fingerprints and a signoff by your local sheriff - if in fact he will sign off and they are not otherwise banned by state law. But I am correct because they are banned from ordinary civilian ownership, say, compared to guns or Bibles, and you will get a no-knock raid if the feds think you own one, or plan to make one, outside of their channels. People who merely owned tubing and disks have been convicted of possession of parts to construct, with intent to construct, a silencer, which is a felony. It is difficult to reconcile this type of enforcement attitude with the concept of something being "not banned." And, indeed, some counties have sheriffs who will not sign off on any class-3 items, and for people who live there, they are indeed very much banned. No doubt there is some overlap between those places and the ones where shooting ranges are imperiled because of noise complaints.

They claim that the lead bullets are bad for the environment.

"They ban steel- and bronze-core handgun ammunition as "cop-killer" bullets, and then ban indoor shooting ranges because of the lead exposure." Also J. Ross, Unintended Consequences. (A line or two from the first quote.)

You could take up a collection for the tax on a silencer from these neighbors - at $200, a mere 20 people who could pony up $10 would cover it. Of course, should they refuse, you could tell that to the cops who came to talk to you about noise. "But officer, I asked them to pay just the tax on one, and they refused, so clearly it isn't really that important to them..."

guns or Bibles, and you will get a no-knock raid if the feds think you own one

Do you mean guns or Bibles or both will get you a no-knock. You know with these Lib-a-Rats in goverment.... ;)

Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies,.....Or... Joe McCarthy was more right than he ever knew

In Indiana there is a National Guard Armory in almost every county. About half of these buildings have an area intended for indoor shooting (long room, bullet traps, etc.) When I came into the Guard in 1979, units were using indoor ranges.

There are NO units firing on Armory property today! Either local laws, OSHA, or EPA has shut down the whole practice. In Evansville a new Armory was built. It was moved into in 1998. This building included a state of art indoor range (.22 only I believe). The soldiers of this Battalion have never been into the range, most have never seen it, the doors have been locked since the unit moved in. The problem? EPA says there is too much lead contaminate in the air if used.

Now friends, this is a goverment owned/operated, military facility, and THEY can't get the right to shoot!

This unit must drive 3 hours to the nearest military post in order to practice with their weapons. It takes about 5,000gals of gas to get them there. (Battalion moving with all it's vehicles). You pay for the gas, you paid for the range, and you are supposedly paying for soldiers who are trained in their weapons.

I don't like public ranges due to the fact they have a one round at a time policy. Since I like to load about 10 - 30 round mags when I shoot, I go to a private farm about an hour from me. It is a pain in the ass, but, I can zero in at 200, then walk slightly out of the range line and back up to 1500 yards. An ideal area that has no immediate plans to shut down.

When I used to live in Sacramento, CA I would have to drive over an hour to get to a decent shooting range near Yuba City, CA. The other range they had was near Rancho Cordova, CA and cost $8 per day and they were way too strict with their rules (probably because some gun hater was aching to shut it down).

When I moved to Ogden, Utah I found they had a nice shooting range real close by that only costs $30 a year for a membership or $3 per day. The range is only open on the weekends in the winter however.

There is a major problem with the need for shooting ranges in the United States, especially in the liberal states.

"And they can't shut down, because they would have to reimburse the state for matching grants..."

Always a bad idea to make deals with the devil. Government money means lose of rights. I don't care if it's states taking Federal grants, or schools or shooting ranges. It's wrong to get tangled in the state money octopus. There will always be strings attached to any money from any government.

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OUT OF RANGE

Shooting Ranges have increasingly come under fire in recent years, prompting NRA to take action.

Subdivision Strangulation

Lawyers, Guns and $$$$$$$$

NRA EFFORTS KEEP SHOOTERS ON THE LINE