.308 Norma
Member
Yesterday afternoon, a buddy of mine took me to the Downey Public Shooting Range to try out a few of one-another’s handguns. Downey is a small town about 20 miles south of here, and even though we’ve lived in this valley for 37 years, until yesterday, I didn’t even know that range existed. As I’ve posted several times, my family’s “shooting range” has always been a county gravel pit about 2 miles south of the house. As it turned out though, I’m actually acquainted with the farmer/rancher who donated the land and used some of his own equipment to help push dirt around and turn that area near Downey into a public shooting range.
Anyway, it’s a real nice place – a 50 yard handgun range, a 200 yard rifle range, and a shotgun trap and skeet range on the other side of the gravel road. There are sidewalks leading around to concrete shooting benches and seats, and even a covered picnic area with a couple of tables a little ways back behind the shooting areas. What’s more, it’s free! There’s a sign on the storage building that reads, “This public shooting range is sponsored by the NRA Foundation through the city of Downey, Idaho.”
Now for the rant – the sign mentioned in the above paragraph had a bullet hole through it! Several of the other signs posted around the range were shot up so badly they were almost unreadable. In the target area on the handgun range it was obvious a lot of shooters had used glass bottles for targets. And all that’s to say nothing of the millions of steel and aluminum cases that people have just left on the ground wherever they fell.
Besides the bullet holes in the signs and storage building, several of the pipes that are the support frames for the target stands were almost ready to collapse because they (whether intentionally or not) had been shot through so many times.
Another guy my buddy introduced me to showed up to shoot his 1911s while we were there. He said he has some pieces of angle iron at home that, now that winter’s over, he is going to bring and weld to the support pipes for the target stands. That way, the bullets will be deflected, instead of going through the pipes. But the old guy is doing it for free – he just wants to have stands for himself and others to hang targets on. He’s a retired Probation Officer, and he said he especially enjoys seeing families show up at the range because the kids of those kinds of families are the ones he, as a Probation Officer seldom had to deal with when they became teenagers.
Anyway, I just can’t understand why some people are so obnoxious. That range is a good place to shoot, or even go have a picnic if that’s your thing. And unless you’re a member of the NRA (as we are) it doesn’t cost a thing. But a few idiots are messing it up. They’re messing it up nearly as badly as the idiots my wife and I are always cleaning up after whenever we go down to the county gravel pit to shoot.
Anyway, it’s a real nice place – a 50 yard handgun range, a 200 yard rifle range, and a shotgun trap and skeet range on the other side of the gravel road. There are sidewalks leading around to concrete shooting benches and seats, and even a covered picnic area with a couple of tables a little ways back behind the shooting areas. What’s more, it’s free! There’s a sign on the storage building that reads, “This public shooting range is sponsored by the NRA Foundation through the city of Downey, Idaho.”
Now for the rant – the sign mentioned in the above paragraph had a bullet hole through it! Several of the other signs posted around the range were shot up so badly they were almost unreadable. In the target area on the handgun range it was obvious a lot of shooters had used glass bottles for targets. And all that’s to say nothing of the millions of steel and aluminum cases that people have just left on the ground wherever they fell.
Besides the bullet holes in the signs and storage building, several of the pipes that are the support frames for the target stands were almost ready to collapse because they (whether intentionally or not) had been shot through so many times.
Another guy my buddy introduced me to showed up to shoot his 1911s while we were there. He said he has some pieces of angle iron at home that, now that winter’s over, he is going to bring and weld to the support pipes for the target stands. That way, the bullets will be deflected, instead of going through the pipes. But the old guy is doing it for free – he just wants to have stands for himself and others to hang targets on. He’s a retired Probation Officer, and he said he especially enjoys seeing families show up at the range because the kids of those kinds of families are the ones he, as a Probation Officer seldom had to deal with when they became teenagers.
Anyway, I just can’t understand why some people are so obnoxious. That range is a good place to shoot, or even go have a picnic if that’s your thing. And unless you’re a member of the NRA (as we are) it doesn’t cost a thing. But a few idiots are messing it up. They’re messing it up nearly as badly as the idiots my wife and I are always cleaning up after whenever we go down to the county gravel pit to shoot.
