I can shoot my shotguns at some private property that my grandpa owns, but he's VERY against handguns and won't allow them on his property.
Your grandpa may be right - in his restrictions, not in his attitude towards handguns (if you are reporting his attitude correctly). In general, it takes much, much less land to shoot shotguns safely than to shoot rifles or pistols.
like say his property isn't really set up to shoot ammo that can fly for 500 yards, ...
Some pistol rounds can go quite a bit farther than 500 yards:
The maximum ranges can be more than a mile for some handgun bullets and more than 4.5 miles for some rifle bullets.
http://www.exteriorballistics.com/ebexplained/5th/36.cfm
On a flat piece of land, if you wanted to be really safe shooting pistols, without berms, you'd need 3-4 square miles of land (figuring a circle of land with a radius of 1 mile). That's over 2000 acres!
Obviously, berms or hills can change the needed area dramatically. The only issue with berms is that people still manage to shoot over berms occasionally.
I know that a lot of people shoot on much smaller patches of land without berms and
feel perfectly safe doing so. Unfortunately, unless their feelings can change the physics, what they feel doesn't make a whole lot of difference. This ain't Oprah
- what you
feel doesn't change the exterior ballistics of a round after it leaves the barrel.
One round escaping from your grandpa's land could cost your grandpa his land.
It's possible that you're grandpa is just a wise man.
Mike
