Another TN gun bill
A push is on to open police shooting ranges to the public. After all, the public does pay for them.
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
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March 30th, 2004 at 12:29 pm
Yeah, but we pay for the cruisers too, and I don’t want to see every jack-n-ape who gets a mind to it hop behind the wheel of one of those.
If we need a municipally owned shooting range (we don’t), then it ought to be separate from the one they use for practicing shooting bad guys.
How about this: an actual, private shooting range that employs taxpaying citizens and generates revenue for the county? I’m all for it.
March 30th, 2004 at 12:36 pm
The trouble with the cruiser analogy is that cruiser don’t spend weeks being idle.
March 30th, 2004 at 12:55 pm
KPD’s gun range is no different than Guncraft’s really…the Sheriff’s department facility may very have the “bad guy” pop-ups, but KPD’s a standard range…just like the public could use.
I seem to remember a news story in the Sentinel a month or two back about a KCSD team dispatched out west and missed shooting a man with a bullseye taped to his chest. They fired like 29 shots and hit bubkis…so it sounds like law enforcement should be using the range more often with the public!
March 30th, 2004 at 2:07 pm
I would prefer all the ranges to be private. Open to the public, sure, but paid for with private dollars.
That being said damn skippy any range paid for with public cash should be open to the public. In NC most of the country ranges (that I was aware of at least) had some provision for public use. & it’s not widely known but any military base that was paid for with federal funds has to make some allowances for public use of their range.
After all, the private citizen has a much greater chance of having to shoot a bad guy than a cop does, so I’d argue that the citizens have a more pressing need for the range than the cops do.
But a private range that employs private citizens but has the proceeds going back to government? No, I’ll pass on the Stalin-lite ranges thanks.
March 30th, 2004 at 2:43 pm
I’m not talking about some kind of special fee (though TN counties would find a way to charge one, I’m sure) for a privately owned gun range. I mean that any revenue earning, licensed business contributes tax dollars, just like wage-earning citizens who live/work/spend in a county.
Cruisers don’t sit idle for weeks? Clearly, we live in different parts of the county. Swing by East Town (Knoxville Center, my ass, says Todd) Mall some night after nine and count all the cruisers sitting in that bigass parking lot. Let me know if you find less than 10. They’re not parked unattended either. Just chillin.
I’m all for public money going to public use. I just don’t think that means I need to be allowed to shoot in the same range as my cops. They don’t need me and every other yahoo around town treating their range the same way we treat every other publicly owned facility. They don’t need to pay for the liability insurance that’s bound to come with civilian shooters, and they sure as hell don’t need us over their shoulders watching how they do things.
I should be allowed to use the bathroom at the City-County building when I need it. I should have access to zoning maps and city council meetings. They’re not laying their lives on the line for me every time they’re on the clock. As long as cops have the inherently dangerous and pressurized jobs that they do, I’m all about letting them have their own dedicated firing range.
…As long as they put Hutchison on bullet-catchin end…
; )
March 30th, 2004 at 2:54 pm
Valid points but, as an example, I am a member of the Volunteer Rifle and Pistol Club. The range is closed the first full weekend of the month so that the Tennessee Air National Guard can go shoot their M16s. When it’s not, it’s open to the public. Police ranges can operate the same way, open to the public when not in use.
March 30th, 2004 at 3:22 pm
I think the level of committment required of the public range-shooters (fee level, club membership, etc) certainly helps avoid potential problems.
Your club is different, though. It’s a club. How in the world would we justifiably have a publicly-funded gun club? If it really is a public range, then it has to be open to everyone who is a taxpayer.
I think I’m also having trouble understanding why this is something that should happen. Even if we can get all of our heads together and figure out a way to rig the logistics of it, we’re still stepping all over the toes of our PD’s and we’ve created a big problem where there wasn’t one before. Until you heard about this bill proposal, were you really driving past the Police or Sheriff facilites thinking, “Damn, if only I exercise my rights as a county taxpayer and shoot in there?”
Let’s get a proposal, instead, to get a one-time (or short-term) budget boost given to the State Parks and Recreation Dept. to set new public shooting range facilities up. I’ll vote yes on that referrendum (spellin’ ain’t my thing). Then we can charge nominal fees for usage, and maybe we can generate enough revenue to keep some of our damn parks open (A moment of silence for ol’ Dumb Sundquist).
The real kicker on this one for me, I think, is what the police and sherrif’s depts want. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind you shooting there. They don’t want the numbnuts that would be shooting there, though.