This country (at least in the neighborhoods where I've lived) needs more public shooting ranges. These give desperate shooters a place to unload, reducing the random ventilating of road signs and cows.
Cities, counties and states build bicycle trails for bicyclists, dirt bike '"parks'" for dirt bikers, snowmobile trails for snowmobilers, kayak runs for kayakers and skateboard parks for truly crazy people. Shooters outnumber them all, but what do we get?
One town I lived in boasted a 400-yard rifle range in the bottom of a deep, narrow valley. It was managed by a gun club that had been accommodating trigger-happy pistoleers and long gunners for some 70 years and teaching NRA hunter safety classes to school kids for decades. In all that time no one almost got shot. Because of this frightening safety record, the range was closed down by a newly elected crop of safety conscious (alternate spelling: a-n-t-i-g-u-n) politicians. You've got to hand it to them, though: In the seven years since they've closed the range, no one has still almost gotten shot. You can't argue with statistics like that.
In contrast, a small town in which I once lived in South Dakota, where anyone can shoot in practically any direction on any day with any long-range rifle range is a mound of dirt pushed up on the north end of the baseball field inside the city limits. But it is securely protected by an open gate that can and will be closed and locked whenever necessary, which hasn't been yet. There was a complaint once that
the booming of someone's .30-06 made it difficult to hear the um pire, but he was calling too big a strike zone for the opposing team's pitcher anyway.
The point is we need shooting ranges and we need them to be perfectly safe and heavily policed to prevent the kind of needless violence some people think should occurat them. And I know the perfect such place in a western community near where I sometimes shoot. This facility can and should be emulated by every town. It was built with public money garnered from excise taxes collected on firearms sales. It was built in an old gravel pit a minimally safe 15 miles from town. It was built with covered shooting benches and target buttes from 25 to 400 yards with separate ranges for handguns, shotguns and rifles! It's wonderful.
For a measly $7 per day, John Q. Public, who paid for this range, can use it practically for free. All he has to do is wait until the gate is opened at 10:00 A.M. any day except Tuesdays and Wednesdays. This is because no one has any need to shoot on Tuesdays or Wednesdays or, for that matter, in the early morning when summer temperatures are below 100 degrees and the wind is blowing at less than 30 miles per hour. By 10:00 A.M. heat shimmer and solar winds make any shooting endeavor more sporting, so before the wind and heat can drop appreciably, the range always closes at 6 P.M.
This schedule also prevents overcrowding by your average yokel who starts work at 8 A.M. and gets off at 5 P.M. Pretty clever, eh? One could argue that an 8:00 A.M. opening would have been sufficient, given the 15-minute drive back to town, but there are a few shooters who work bankers' hours. By 10 A.M. m o s t of them are safely tucked away, leaving dozens of benches free and clear for the eight retirees and two trust fund babies in town.
If your county suffers from shot-up road signs, broken bottles, riddled cans and ventilated livestock, urge your politicians to begin construction of a public shooting range like this at once. That'll fix the problem.