[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Rural shooters create problems (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 3/21/2011 5:06:19 AM EDT
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The shooters' alley is littered with thousands of shotgun shell casings, and an uncountable number of brass bullet casings. Bullet-riddled targets on a recent day included a washer and dryer, a couch, computer monitors and bottles. Read more: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/03/20/1592518/reckless-shooters-creating-problems.html#ixzz1HEsQBxvJ http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/03/20/1592518/reckless-shooters-creating-problems.html |
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There are some good shooting spots around here that were like that.
Great places to shoot. Now, big, steel signs: No Shooting. These thugs ruined it for everyone. And, as for picking up brass... You would never run into good brass there. Piles on piles of spent .22 casings, and cheap shotgun hulls. I would have my kids pick up everything, to try to make the places nicer, but to no avail. Folks even tried making home made signs: Pick up your trash. To no avail. Even the BLM public range here is slowly starting to look like that. I was shooting on Saturday. Same thing. shot-up "stuff" old boxes, to old appliances. Tons of .22 casings, and cheap shotgun hulls... I picked up my stuff, and filled a couple old wal-mart bags with trash, and left thinking... "Man we make ourselves look stupid..." I thought how dumb we would look if we asked the city, state, or BLM for another range... And took them to the current public range near here to show them how us shooters would be stewards over the land we would use... Back home in Salt Lake City, you need to leave the valley to get to *free* areas to shoot... I wonder why...  
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There are some good shooting spots around here that were like that. Great places to shoot. Now, big, steel signs: No Shooting. These thugs ruined it for everyone. And, as for picking up brass... You would never run into good brass there. Piles on piles of spent .22 casings, and cheap shotgun hulls. I would have my kids pick up everything, to try to make the places nicer, but to no avail. Folks even tried making home made signs: Pick up your trash. To no avail. Even the BLM public range here is slowly starting to look like that. I was shooting on Saturday. Same thing. shot-up "stuff" old boxes, to old appliances. Tons of .22 casings, and cheap shotgun hulls... I picked up my stuff, and filled a couple old wal-mart bags with trash, and left thinking... "Man we make ourselves look stupid..." I thought how dumb we would look if we asked the city, state, or BLM for another range... And took them to the current public range near here to show them how us shooters would be stewards over the land we would use... Back home in Salt Lake City, you need to leave the valley to get to *free* areas to shoot... I wonder why... Yep - the pattern repeats itself all over the USA. "Gun owners" as a group seem to have a VERY high percentage of people who are complete a-holes (not to mention unsafe). Sad, really.
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This is why designated and trained Range Safety Officers are vital if you want to keep a public place to shoot safe and friendly. Otherwise, no matter how many good guys come out to shoot, it only takes a few assholes to ruin it for everybody.
I fought a similar losing battle in the Ocala National Forest (Florida) many years ago
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Back home in Salt Lake City, you need to leave the valley to get to *free* areas to shoot... I wonder why... Because of crap just like in the OP. The west side of Utah Lake where I love to shoot has turned into a cesspool. Washers, dryers, furniture you name it along with tens of thousands of spent shotgun hulls everwhere you look. I've tired of packing out other folks shit, I used to take along garbage bags to remove a couple extra bags of crap and leave the plce better than I found it. Now days, two trash bags won't even leave a dent. It won't be too long before the shooters around here lose this this resource due to trash and the fires started by idiots. |
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"Gun owners" as a group seem to have a VERY high percentage of people who are complete a-holes (not to mention unsafe). Sad, really.
Average Americans, I am afraid. Unfortunatly these are so true! I know in Indiana they have had that same problem down county roads. They closed a lot of the land fill areas for the trash and people don't want to or wont spend the money to dispose of items properly. They have sold off mine property so you cant shoot there being it's private property now and those same people don't want to or wont spend 70.00 for yearly range membership. So both trash and shooters end up in one spot. The sad thing is we all have to drive by it if you live not even that far out in the county. as far as the coment on gun owners being a-holes that is so true as well. Go to Indiana gun owners.com. Not all but some are all over the place. More posts than not over there anymore are sounding more like they want to be soveregn citezens than anything else. |
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I fought a similar losing battle in the Ocala National Forest (Florida) many years ago What happened there? It was still open last time I checked, although I have to admit the place looked like hell compared to the last time I'd been there. Crowded as all getout, too. Many years ago (early 90's), I went to shoot there and a pair of militia types (black berets, black BDU's, 400 pounds, etc.) showed up with some full-auto stuff and began blasting away at their targets and everyone elses. When someone asked them to stop, they started spounting BS until the entire firing line turned toward them with murder in their eyes. The scumbags quickly left. Assholes. 
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Quoted: Quoted: Back home in Salt Lake City, you need to leave the valley to get to *free* areas to shoot... I wonder why... Because of crap just like in the OP. The west side of Utah Lake where I love to shoot has turned into a cesspool. Washers, dryers, furniture you name it along with tens of thousands of spent shotgun hulls everwhere you look. I've tired of packing out other folks shit, I used to take along garbage bags to remove a couple extra bags of crap and leave the plce better than I found it. Now days, two trash bags won't even leave a dent. It won't be too long before the shooters around here lose this this resource due to trash and the fires started by idiots. The UTHTF has done a couple clean ups there in the past. Admittedly I haven't been out there lately to shoot, but it's probably getting about time to do it again. |
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It's because if you actually pick up after yourself and don't think appliances are suitable biodegradable targets,you're a fuckin' tree huggin hippie Commie
Sadly,that's the average American mindset: my trash is somebody else's problem. It ain't as if slobs laden with ignorance are somehow limited to D voting minorities. The dumbest goddamn thing I have ever seen was a similar spot in North Carolina that was beside some railroad tracks. If a train passed by,the rednecks would stop shooting at their old washers and light up the side of a box car 
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"Gun owners" as a group seem to have a VERY high percentage of people who are complete a-holes (not to mention unsafe). Sad, really.
Average Americans, I am afraid. Average, rural, Americans. Country folks are sooner to throw their hamburger sack out their truck window than to wait until they get home or work and put it in the trash. I used to be one of them. Back when glass cola bottles were the norm, and if/when the grass on the side of roads would be burned off, one could see that unless being very careful, a person could not walk there without stepping on a bottle. I grew-up in NW Alabama––I reckon the littering-est people on Earth.
The reason is not culture, but circumstance. Now that I see the light, I HATE litter and litter bugs. It drives me crazy to go to little league games and watch people throw their trash on the ground when they're sometimes within 20 feet of a garbage can. A guy at Home Despot, this past Friday, got out of his truck and dropped his bottle in the lot and then walked within three feet of a garbage can at the entrance. I wanted to pick it up and put it in the bed, but I don't mess with people's stuff. More on topic, my grandfather was an exception to the typical rural litterbug. He stopped letting people hunt on his land because people wouldn't pick up their hulls and cigarette butts. Some of the best dove hunting on Earth around his millet and sorgham fields; the air above them would shimmer with the wings of thousands of doves. I still recall him years ago predicting what would happen when the deposit-less bottles appeared; I remember him saying that fast-food-to-go containers should be reusable and given with an expensive deposit. (Impracticable of course, but he was right that it would probably work.) |
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Quoted: There are some good shooting spots around here that were like that. Great places to shoot. Now, big, steel signs: No Shooting. These thugs ruined it for everyone. And, as for picking up brass... You would never run into good brass there. Piles on piles of spent .22 casings, and cheap shotgun hulls. I would have my kids pick up everything, to try to make the places nicer, but to no avail. Folks even tried making home made signs: Pick up your trash. To no avail. Even the BLM public range here is slowly starting to look like that. I was shooting on Saturday. Same thing. shot-up "stuff" old boxes, to old appliances. Tons of .22 casings, and cheap shotgun hulls... I picked up my stuff, and filled a couple old wal-mart bags with trash, and left thinking... "Man we make ourselves look stupid..." I thought how dumb we would look if we asked the city, state, or BLM for another range... And took them to the current public range near here to show them how us shooters would be stewards over the land we would use... Back home in Salt Lake City, you need to leave the valley to get to *free* areas to shoot... I wonder why... Was visiting family out in Colorado once and we went out to do some shooting out in the middle of the desert. There was shot up trash everywhere... It was sad. |
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Simple fact: If *WE* do not police the public land we shoot on, eventually we will lose the right to shoot there. The pattern is set.
You cannot make stupid, irresponsible people take responsibility for themselves, so if there is a mess, we clean it up. If you see somebody being irresponsible with a gun on public land, it's your call whether you want to bother talking to them or not. An awful lot of the people here who shoot, treat it like fishing... if it doesn't involve a 24 pack, it's not shootin'. I'd rather just clean up after them than get shot. But the powers that be will not make a distinction between those of us who don't abuse the privilege and those who do. They will simply shut it down. John |
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hippie said i wish BLM wouldn't allow shooting on land open to hiking maybe land open to shooting shouldn't be open to hiking The 'hippie' I saw quoted in the article said it should be one or the other, not both at the same time Perfectly reasonable. That. "The land should be designated for target practice or for other activities but not for both. It is only a matter of time before someone is shot up there," she said.
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I fought a similar losing battle in the Ocala National Forest (Florida) many years ago What happened there? It was still open last time I checked, although I have to admit the place looked like hell compared to the last time I'd been there. Crowded as all getout, too. Many years ago (early 90's), I went to shoot there and a pair of militia types (black berets, black BDU's, 400 pounds, etc.) showed up with some full-auto stuff and began blasting away at their targets and everyone elses. When someone asked them to stop, they started spounting BS until the entire firing line turned toward them with murder in their eyes. The scumbags quickly left. Assholes. Back in the mid '80s a few of us regulars were working with a friendly Park Ranger to keep the place up and to prevent the anti-types from having an excuse to shut it down. We would volunteer and keep the place clean, post signage, and inspect the berm. The Ranger would spend more of his time making patrols in an effort to keep the bad behavior at bay. Unfortunatley, without a full-time presence it was always a losing battle. Signs would be torn down and shot. Garbage barrels would be rolled down range and shot, any improvements to the benches or the berm would become insta-targets. I believe most of the people using the range were good, responsible shooters but it only takes a few assholes to do a lot of damage. Like the OP story, photos of the asshatery were often found in local papers along with calls for "more gun control". Glad to hear it is still open  My biggest WTF incident involved a full line of shooters blazing away when one of the shooters who was dressed like he fell out of a Miami Vice episode (did I mention this was the 1980s  ) and shooting a semi-auto "MAC" type pistol from the hip proceeded to start walking down range while shooting  It took a full 30 seconds (at least) for every shooter to realize what was happening until "Sonny Crockett" was the only one left still shooting. He finally looked back at all the faces and waved his hand as he ran back to the firing line. After being collectively chastised about his stupidity for several minutes the line assembled back into a hot firing position. Then, this idiot starts the whole "walking fire" drill over again At this point I left since I didn't feel like spending the rest of the day answering questions as part of a homicide investigation.
Oh, his explanation was that he wanted to know how far away he could shoot and still hit what he was "aiming" at - from the hip
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Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: "Gun owners" as a group seem to have a VERY high percentage of people who are complete a-holes (not to mention unsafe). Sad, really. Average Americans, I am afraid. Average, rural, Americans. Country folks are sooner to throw their hamburger sack out their truck window than to wait until they get home or work and put it in the trash. I used to be one of them. Back when glass cola bottles were the norm, and if/when the grass on the side of roads would be burned off, one could see that unless being very careful, a person could not walk there without stepping on a bottle. I grew-up in NW Alabama––I reckon the littering-est people on Earth. The reason is not culture, but circumstance. Now that I see the light, I HATE litter and litter bugs. It drives me crazy to go to little league games and watch people throw their trash on the ground when they're sometimes within 20 feet of a garbage can. A guy at Home Despot, this past Friday, got out of his truck and dropped his bottle in the lot and then walked within three feet of a garbage can at the entrance. I wanted to pick it up and put it in the bed, but I don't mess with people's stuff. More on topic, my grandfather was an exception to the typical rural litterbug. He stopped letting people hunt on his land because people wouldn't pick up their hulls and cigarette butts. Some of the best dove hunting on Earth around his millet and sorgham fields; the air above them would shimmer with the wings of thousands of doves. I still recall him years ago predicting what would happen when the deposit-less bottles appeared; I remember him saying that fast-food-to-go containers should be reusable and given with an expensive deposit. (Impracticable of course, but he was right that it would probably work.) Yes, no and kinda. When I was a kid my grandfather used to just haul junk off and toss it out behind the barn in a pasture. I remember playing in cars from the 30s and 40s that were rusting out back when I was a kid. I also remember people used to just vent their water into a river that was in front of our property when I was a kid. I remember seeing what I now know was laundry detergent bubbles floating in the shallows. I think that's less true than it used to be and depends on who is involved. The woods around a trailer park full of people on welfare will be full of stuff like old household appliances and trash bags even if trash removal is paid for by the owner. However property owned by people like farmers or a guy who has a construction company? At least the people I know like that don't let junk and trash pile up and keep their property up. Last summer one evening I was supposed to meet my wife for dinner and she got held up at work so rather than go home I parked in a suburban strip mall and went for a walk. I saw that along the road in this fairly expensive suburb the road was lined for over a mile with cigarette butts and I realized it was where people commuting into the city were held up at a traffic light so they through trash out of their Volvos and Saabs.  A couple of years ago I was hiking on some state land and found a somewhat newer washing machine way the hell out in the woods Someone had to haul that thing back there probably with a snowmobile or something as it's pretty swampy in the warmer months. It would have been less work to take the damn thing to the dump even with the dump fees.
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I don't see anything wrong with having a Fudd range where you aren't allowed to have semi-autos, a family range where you have extensive safety requirements, ie no quick draws, nobody allowed to load mags while range is cold. I also don't see a problem with having a range where you shoot junk targets and allow some messiness.
Our range similar to that was cleaned up recently. Now you have to pay to get in and get a ticket if the sheriff finds you without a pass. No junk targets allowed, you must pick up all your brass when finished. I like a good redneck range where you don't have a range officer breathing down your neck and you can just shoot and I miss the old range. |
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i had a good spot too where the owners put big fucking signs all over the place "you are welcome to shoot here, but CLEAN UP or we will CLOSE the pit". they posted more and more signs until finally someone got back there and dumped what appeared to be a full truck bed of old packaged meat. you could smell it from a mile away. a few weeks later i was driving by and someone was welding big metal gates up. i have my own places to shoot, including my own property, but options are always nice. i can't figure how people think it's OK to just drop off a washing machine, or leave an old car. |
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Y'all are elbow to elbow with the type right here amongst the membership of this forum, and you're wasting your breath if you think you'll change these slobs.
There's a reason privately owned public access ranges or private shooting clubs cost so much to use - the maintenance costs are sky high due to ignoramuses, jackasses, and assholes. |
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I've brought some junk out to shoot now and then but I don't bring the kind that you can't clean up. Glass bottles, TVs, etc no way. I do enjoy hard-drives, and the occasional milk-jug of ice. But I clean up the mess at the end. Frankly, you are fighting a losing battle if you think spent shells are going to be picked up by the average Joe. They won't and I never saw a time when they did. Every range I can remember that was not a membership affair had as much brass as gravel. Shit, I have several rifles that toss the cases out into the weeds and grass up front. The only way to police that up is to call the range cold for 20 minutes while I hunt it down. Tried a tarp once and it only caught a percentage of it. If you have a range, you have shells on the ground. If the standard you want to set is that in order to be tolerable you can't have that, then your desire is just to close ranges. It's like bitching that campgrounds have trash in the fire pit and then proclaiming you have to shut them down because of slobs.
Since I reload, you generally find my butt crawling around on the ground for every last case I can find. |
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"You can't regulate stupid," said Steve Smith, another BLM spokesman.
This guy must be an arfcommer...hehe Whenever I see pics of places like that I think of that Indian in the trash commercial from the 70's. It's just plain sad and only adds fuel to the lefts perception that gun owners are ignorant, sloppy rednecks. I don't mind paying $200 a year to shoot in a safe, clean environment. |
| Where I shoot is on private property, I have specific permission to be there under certain conditions: I give preference to workers (it's a gravel pit, so occasionally there are guys up there picking up a load of gravel), I don't shoot any equipment, I can shoot whatever I want but I have to clean up after, I pick up brass and hulls. |
| Had the same thing in Miami off Tamiami trail.Idiots were bringing freon cans to shoot and whatever appliances that needed dumped it ruined the chance to shoot away from the city.I started reloading back then so brass clean up was my job!One guy I would see regular picking up brass found bodies two times!Moved to Georgia mountains and shoot in my yard! |
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Sounds like an open range in a rural area, about 15 years ago that was closed The visitors were city slickers looking for fun Around here it's mostly lazy rednecks who leave their trash, shit (yes literally), and everything else strewn about wherever they go. It doesn't matter where you go, city or otherwise, there are plenty of people who no longer give a shit or have any pride in much of anything.
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The shooters' alley is littered with thousands of shotgun shell casings, and an uncountable number of brass bullet casings. Bullet-riddled targets on a recent day included a washer and dryer, a couch, computer monitors and bottles. Read more: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/03/20/1592518/reckless-shooters-creating-problems.html#ixzz1HEsQBxvJ http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/03/20/1592518/reckless-shooters-creating-problems.html I'm sure it was the shooters who dragged out the couch, washing machine, etc., rather than the welfare lard-asses who didn't want to pay a disposal fee. |
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You see the same shit going fishing. Empty worm containers, beer cans, fishing line, etc. People shit where they live. You would think that people who are oriented to the outdoors would be the most ardent protectors of it. You would think. Then again, I think most are. I know I am. Pack it in, pack it out. I don't leave anything to be noticed. And so when one douchebag leaves a bunch of shit laying around, everyone sees it. there's no cleaning crew for 'nature.' Some parks have groundskeepers, but how much can they really pick up? When one person leaves trash, it stays there for a long, long time. |