Lighten up fellas,
@rpenmanparker isn’t used to a paradigm of open spaces and shooting outside of a box. No hunting, no outside shooting...
For his benefit - when you’re shooting somewhere like that, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the Brainerd, MN area for work and pleasure, you people aren’t going to be “walking through there.” Farmers and ranchers don’t just go walking around their fields randomly, for no reason, so finding safe places without a berm is really quite simple. And when there are only a few landowners within MILES of your location, it’s not so uncommon for simple contact. One of my neighbors knows if he sees my truck on our half mile road, he should pull in and check with me before he drives out to spray thistle. I text another neighbor and he pens his calves after morning feeding any time I want to shoot the adjacent property to keep them out of my line of fire. The hunters on one of the properties near me and I have an agreement on our stand positions, such we can’t ever find ourselves in each others line of fire AND such we don’t end up with the only house within 3 miles behind our targets (about a mile as the crow flies from either stand).
Life really can be safe outside of your box, if you’d ever find interest in stepping outside. For example, in this spot pictured below, I can shoot a bit over 1,200yrds between tree lines (shown at 800 to the targets, 1,080 to the trees behind the targets). There’s a hill rising behind that tree line at about 3/4mile which snuffs bullets well, and not a house for 4 miles in that direction. There’s a lane about a half mile wide throughout that strip where Man really doesn’t touch AT ALL outside of planting, harvest, and moving cattle. Once two old farmers die and those houses get torn down (knowing they will be, since I know the farmers), the lane will be about 6 miles wide between houses.
I can appreciate the majority of our nation’s population has never experienced living in this kind of country.
Of course, a guy can have a VERY simple conversation with any artilleryman about dangerspace and swept range to understand the safe range of any projectile. If you’re formulating some silliness of “well if you shoot staight up you might hit a plane,” then the conversation is without intelligence. Guys do send rounds over the berm sometimes, but it’s rare, and in a majority of our country’s land mass, you can send rounds without any worry of making contact with anything or any one. As an example: my 6 creed has a dangerspace of about 56yrds at 1500yrds on a 10ft Target. Meaning if I’m aiming at the top of 10ft at 1500, my bullet is in the dirt at 1556yrds. If I slip a shot over a 20ft berm at 1500yrds, it’s in the dirt by 1600yrds. And pointing out here - my dialed correction for 1,500yrds is right about 1 degree, as it’s 18.2mil, which subtends ~82ft at this range... So if a guy is shooting say, 300yrds, his bullet just isn’t making it to 2 miles. If I only make it to 1600 by putting 102ft under my bullet (82ft dialed plus 20ft berm), think of how short of range a 300yrd shot will find dirt... And of course, that’s considering a hyper-velocity, high ballistic coefficient RIFLE cartridge - the consideration is laughable when you talk about low velocity handgun cartridges with poor BC bullets.