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Posted by David Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Sunday, April 03, 2011 at 14:09:02 :
In Reply to: Re: OT shooting range. posted by Vaughn [99.104.71.86] on Sunday, April 03, 2011 at 12:25:22 :
The Pennsylvania thing just sounds like a money grab to me, like charging you $5 to go to the park, or requiring a building permit to put new siding on a house. It's a standard government ploy to pass a law requiring a permit for something and then charge for it. Of course then people don't get the permits and then they need to hire more people to enforce them, and overall the permits end up not even covering the cost of enforcing them.
But there is a big issue with shooting ranges near populated areas. All over Western Washington they're having a big problem both setting up new ranges and keeping existing ones open. There are several problems. First, land is getting too valuable, and the owners of private ranges (and even some government agencies) are sorely tempted to sell out to real estate developers. Next, once the land around the shooting range gets developed it's like when the city people buy houses in the new subdivision next to the dairy farm and then complain that the manure stinks. It scares them to hear shooting nearby, and eventually if all the land around the range gets developed, it really does become potentially unsafe, and the land is too valuable to keep undeveloped like that.
Even on public land, where there value of the land doesn't matter, the anti-gun people have two main avenues of attack. One is environmental. They'll find some ditch with frogs in it somewhere on the property and then allege that the "wetland" will get poisoned with lead. The other is they'll read that a rifle bullet has a range of over a mile, and they'll find a school that's only a mile away, and claim that stray bullets will hit the children on the playground. Nothing is more intimidating to a public official than an auditorium full of angry mothers in tears and hysterics carrying on about how worried they are that their babies will be killed.
These days, city shooters are pretty much stuck with driving way out to the boonies to shoot their rifles and using private indoor ranges for pistol practice.
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