Dear HCN,
This is regarding your
“Heard around the West” article about the closure of the Tucson Rod
& Gun Club rifle range in Sabino Canyon (HCN, 3/16/98). I am a
loyal HCN reader and also an avid hunter and shooter. During the
late “70s through the mid-’80s, I spent many hours at the Sabino
Canyon range. At that time, it was arguably one of the safest, most
pleasant, most well-thought-out and well-managed shooting ranges in
the state.
If it is now considered “noisy and
potentially dangerous,” it’s because the greedy, short-sighted real
estate developers and agents have pushed the city council and
Forest Service to allow development right up to the boundary of the
buffer zone needed to maintain the integrity of the impact area.
The intended consequence, of course, is to have this wonderful
public facility declared a social menace and public health hazard.
This will then render this small patch of highly lucrative and
relatively undisturbed Upper Sonoran Desert “safe,” thus ensuring
the proliferation of strip malls and Circle Ks, gas stations and
hamburger joints.
It will also impose an enormous
hardship on thousands of responsible, ethical and safety-conscious
shooters and sportsmen, and will result in willy-nilly plinking on
adjacent vacant and open land. I can assure you that at-large,
unrestricted shooting adjacent to residential areas, by an
unsupervised public, with inadequate or nonexistent backstops, will
fulfill your description of “noisy and dangerous’ in
spades.
I am no big fan of Idaho Republican Rep.
Helen Chenoweth, but the shooting range was there first. In this
case, she is right on the
money.
Steven
Spearman
Boulder City,
Nevada
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Guns came first.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
