Free Land For You
Ron Spomer Outdoors - Shooting
One of the joys of public land is the freedom it allows. This seems like a no-brainer. As long as we don't ruin the resource for others, we ought to be able to "run wild," right? I'm frustrated by heavily managed public lands such as State and National Parks, National Forest Service campgrounds, etc. where you pay to drive in, pay to park, pay for 10 square feet of ground on which to pitch a tent, pay to launch a boat on which is pasted a license you paid for in order to enjoy the privilege of pulling the boat on a trailer you licensed to hitch to your licensed truck, which you get to drive because of the driver's license in your pocket. I can tolerate all the taxes, but the lost freedoms really bother me. Take "public" shooting ranges, for instance. You pay by the year or by the day. But then you go to shoot on Monday and the range is closed. You try Tuesday afternoon but it's only opened Tues. morning. You visit Friday after work to discover the gate just closing because it's 5 PM. When you do catch the range open, you must wait for the range master to grant permission to set your targets, load your rifle, commence firing. Stop firing. Check your targets. It's like being back in grade school. Why all this control? What freedoms have we lost and why? Obviously the control is needed for public safety. You can't have Billy Bob running downrange to change his target while Bobby Bill is banging away at his. You can't have idiots swinging loaded guns willy nilly around the benches. Etc. etc. It's common sense precaution augmented by threats of lawsuits and layers of government regulations that bury the freedom of "plinking." An alternative across much of the West is BLM lands. Like Forest Service lands, these are yours and mine. The big difference is that BLM is less heavily regulated. With a few exceptions, especially during fire season, you can go where you want, camp where you want, shoot where you want. Locally hundreds of shooters head to the nearest BLM lands to plink, sight-in, and practice their shooting. Freedom! The "range" is open 24/7. The result is a disaster. At a popular local BLM shooting grounds you literally take your life in someone else's hands. Idiots with guns will set up targets with no backstop aiming toward other shooters already set up against reasonable backstops. You literally see folks shooting simultaneously to every direction of the compass. Bullets whine overhead or plunk into the ground nearby. I've watched carloads of teenagers disembark beside someone shooting 100-yard targets, then walk directly behind those targets in search of ground squirrels. And once these "cautious" shooters depart, they leave behind a legacy of not just empty hulls and broken clay pigeons, but blasted glass bottles, riddled plastic bottles, ragged cardboard boxes, broken TV sets, hub caps, washers and dryers and even automobiles shot full of holes. It's disheartening and baffling and points directly to the fees, taxes and micromanagement we endure on our other "public lands." Recently, because the local gun range was closed and I had a visitor who wanted to try a few of my rifles, we visited the closest BLM disaster range and witnessed all of the above and more. More, in this case, included a freshly shot burrowing owl near a growing pile of shot and broken household trash. We've all seen this brand of lawless wonton waste. We've been railing against it for decades. My observations are that it has decreased, but we will never eradicate it. Instead, our freedom to enjoy freedom on public lands will continue to decline until we are all paying for the privilege of having a government worker give us step-by-step instructions on how to behave within a severely limited range of options. And it will be our own darned fault. What do you see? What solutions can you suggest? How can we encourage responsible gun ownership/use with maximum freedom without enduring this kind of senseless, disgusting "trashing of America?" # # #
