Range Protection Matters
If you're a hunter, a skeet or trap shooter, or a recreational target shooter, you probably know about this. If you're one of those folks who has no real interest in the shooting sports, but want to be able to keep your carry permit, you may not know about it.Regardless, it's important. And there's work to be done. Let's get to it.
Why Range Protection is Important
This session, once again, the Minnesota legislature will be considering a range protection bill.
It's important, and not just to hunters and afficionados of the shooting sports.
A bit of history, first. As recently as ten years ago, there were quite literally dozens of shooting ranges in or within a short drive of the metro area. Several of the VFWs had inside ranges, for example. They're important, in a lot of ways. That hunters need a place to sight in their rifles is obvious. What's also obvious is that if kids are going to learn about gun safety—and they should—there needs to be places that they can go to do that. For some folks in the community, trap or skeet is their golf—instead of knocking a small white ball around for a few hours, they head down to the range and break little clay frisbees.
But the ranges, in and out of the metro area, are under a lot of pressure. Some—just some—people who buy homes near a range seem to find themselves shocked that there's actually loud sounds coming from a range. No, it's not like the airport noise problem; the noise at MSP has increased over the years, as more and more flights come in. All in all, there's much less activity at metro-area ranges than there was, say, ten or twenty years ago, and much less noise—still, there is constant pressure, part of it politically motivated (and I'll get to that), to shut the ranges down, and gun clubs in the metro area are under constant pressure, and constant threat of just that.
I'm not sure how somebody could buy a home next to a shooting range and be surprised to discover that there are occasional banging sounds coming from it, but it happens. And, when they do, many of them pressure their local government to shut the range down.
Ranges are important, and not just to those of us who are members of gun clubs. Whether or not you look at it as a conspiracy—I don't—marginalizing the shooting sports is always a necessary predecessor to increasingly draconian gun laws. "Gun control"—no matter how packaged—depends on ignorance about firearms and the issues around them.
In the long run, the real barrier to even more counterproductive "gun control" laws isn't an armed populace—it's educated voters, people who understand firearms, and the issues around them, and will go into the voting booth armed... with that knowledge. That's what brought us the MCPPA. And that's why range protection is, in the long run, every bit as important as passing the MCPPA was.Digression: Honest, I know that sounds extreme. But it's true. After, quite literally, decades of "gun control" laws, all across the country, nobody has been able to show that any of them has actually been able to do any good, at least in terms of the supposed benefits of such laws on public safety. None. That's not an overstatement; the Centers for Disease Control had a task force looking at gun control laws for two years, and the best that they could come up with was a claim that more study is needed.
Let's take a look at the politics, for a moment. What brought us the Minnesota Citizens Personal Protection Act of 2003—the carry law—wasn't just the work of hundreds of activists, over a number of years, as important as that was. It wasn't just the leadership of CCRN/GOCRA, as vital as Joe Olson, David Gross, and Tim Grant were. It wasn't just the heroic efforts of legislators like Lynda Boudreau and Pat Pariseau, as vital as that was.
It was, quite simply, the voters.
The 2002 bill came very close to passage, but the DFL metrocrat leadership, headed by then-Senate Majority Leader Roger Moe, was able to beg, buy, and bully just enough votes to stop it, with many DFLers sitting on the sidelines, saying, in effect, that it wasn't an important enough issue. To them.
And then there was an election. If you look at the results of the 2002 elections, one thing is clear: when it comes to the MCPPA, there's nothing in the middle of the road except for roadkill. Legislators who had refused to take a position, one way or another, found themselves out of the legislature; those who had taken strong positions, on either side, by and large survived.
As a result of the election, we found ourselves with a huge majority in favor of the MCPPA in the House, and a decent-sized one in the Senate.
Bottom line: it was the voters that made it happen in Minnesota, just as it's happened in thirty-plus other states.
Absent a large gun community—which consists of far more hunters and shooting sports enthusiasts than it does of people with carry permits—that just wouldn't have happened.
What Range Protection Does
The principal is simple: if a range is already in existence, and doesn't become a real, objective problem, in terms of either noise or safety, for those around it, it stays. If it becomes a problem, the range has the opportunity to fix the problem—at its own expense. If the city/county authority that wants to get rid of it, it has to pay both the fair price of the land, and for the relocation.The objective standards part of it is important; if there's a problem with the noise, it's got to be more than just a psychological problem for those folks who didn't notice that they'd moved next to a range; it establishes objective standards.
What's In It for You?
If you're not interested in the shooting sports, that's fine, honest. I think they're fun, but, hell, different strokes for different folks.But there is something in it for the carry community:
6.15 Sec. 8. [87A.08] [PUBLIC ACCESS TO SHOOTING RANGES.]Yup. Most metro area police departments have very good ranges, paid for with taxpayer dollars, with all sorts of capabilities that the private ranges don't. Most of the time, those ranges sit idle. Burnsville Pistol Range—my favorite place to shoot—is often overburdened, particularly on weekends; Bill's Gun Range and Armored Fire are very expensive.
6.16 Shooting ranges maintained or operated, in whole or in
6.17 part, with public funds must be reasonably available for public
6.18 use. A reasonable fee in an amount not to exceed the actual
6.19 additional direct costs caused by public use may be charged.
If this bill passes, it'll open up the police ranges for the rest of us. The police will, of course, still have priority there—that's only reasonable—but we'll be able to use them.