Gun Ranges' Slow Retreat

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Gun Ranges' Slow Retreat Sprawling Suburbs Force Clubs to Close Jim Cole, the range officer at a Westminster, Maryland, gun club, takes a few shots on the range with a rifle. (Robert A. Reeder - The Post) By David SnyderWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, October 1, 2001; Page B01 The Taneytown Rod and Gun Club's firing range is now a soccer field, and the bullet-pocked targets have been replaced by playground equipment. In the woods where skeet used to explode with shotgun blasts, brand-new subdivisions signal a new way of life.The club saw suburbia coming a decade ago and moved its Carroll County shooting range into a more rural area in northeast Frederick County. Members thought they'd beaten the rush of suburban values and complaints, but they ran into more of the same.At the Frederick site, neighbors have delayed the club's plans for eight years. Where a large shooting range was supposed to be, there are only cornfields and a makeshift place to shoot. Frustration has set in."We're getting all the people moving out of Baltimore and Washington and suburbia, and they want to dictate to us our lifestyle," said Godfrey Miller, president of the 80-member club, founded in 1945. "There is a big misunderstanding."Once a mainstay of rural life, gun clubs across the Washington region increasingly find their neighbors -- many of them transplanted urbanites -- unwilling to tolerate shooting ranges and what they entail: noise, safety concerns and a culture wedded to firearms.About half of the shooting ranges in Maryland, most owned by gun clubs, have moved or closed in the past 20 years, said Bob Beyer, associate director of the wildlife and heritage service at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.The decline has raised concerns not only among gun enthusiasts but also among some in government who say there must be safe, well-contained venues for people who want to shoot."Hunters and shooters who want to become more proficient need a good, safe place to do it without being limited because they're not a member of a particular [gun] club," said Beyer, who chaired the shooting range committee at the Natural Resources Department, which has given grants to shooting ranges to make them more accessible to the public.The Virginia suburbs appear to have fewer closings, but the pressure is clearly on gun clubs to cut their noise, said Jerry Sims, of the state's Department of Game and Inland Fisheries."It's harder and harder for people to find a safe place to shoot," Sims said.Because of concerns that many shooting ranges are on the verge of extinction, the Maryland General Assembly passed legislation this year exempting a number of gun clubs from state noise ordinances.Bill sponsor Sen. Philip C. Jimeno (D-Anne Arundel) said he wanted to "protect the right of law-abiding citizens to participate in gun clubs."We're just saying, 'Buyer beware,' " he said. "Gun clubs have been there, and there's a certain noise associated with"them.The decline of shooting ranges comes as huge swaths of farmland have been converted to housing subdivisions for families unfamiliar with rural ways, including an unspoken tolerance for the boom and clatter of target practice.In Frederick County, near Mount Airy, a recently proposed subdivision has spurred a nearby gun club to protest; it's afraid that it will be forced to move once people move in. On Oct. 10, the county's planning commission will review the proposal, which has also raised concerns that it may disturb unmarked graves near an antebellum black cemetery."The old-timers don't care" about the noise from the gun range, said Michael Irish, who has lived near the shooting range for decades and has spoken out against the proposed development. "But there's a different breed of people coming up here in the last 15 to 20 years."For those living in homes built near shooting ranges, the noise can be intolerable."It's nerve-racking," said Patricia Fisher, one of several neighbors who successfully sued to prevent the Taneytown club from building a new range in Frederick County. "I wasn't sure I wanted to keep living in a place where this was going on."The club sold its former site in Taneytown to the town government, which made it a park. The club expected to be able to quickly build a new range near Fisher's house in Frederick County, but neighborhood resistance has held it up.So for eight years, the club has had a clubhouse but no place to shoot. Membership has dwindled from about 150 to about 80.Many of the neighbors, including Fisher, have lived in the area for years. But their fears about gun clubs are shared around the region by thousands of recent transplants.The Cresap Rifle Club in Frederick, for instance, was forced several years ago to move its range about a half-mile when a housing subdivision was built nearby.Many members are still bitter about the protracted political battle leading up to their departure."They think we're just a bunch of rednecks who want to come out here and shoot and drink beer," member Dwayne Miller said.Miller and several of the club's members, all men, gathered at their firing range recently to discuss among themselves the future of the club, and its past. They describe a place that is as much a social gathering spot, a place for fathers and sons to spend time together, as it is a shooting space.With the demise of shooting ranges, then, comes the fading of yet another symbol of rural life, member Bill Compton said."This is more than just a place to shoot," he said. "This used to be a rural community, but it's turning into a suburban, or even metropolitan, one. People have different interests."For the ranges that remain in business, waiting times have increased as people come from as far as 100 miles away to practice shooting.At the Hap Baker Firearms Facility near Westminster in Carroll County, people come from Baltimore, Washington and Pennsylvania. During hunting season, shooters wait up to 30 minutes for practice time.The range is owned and operated by the county and was built in 1996, after a coalition of local gun enthusiasts lobbied the county government to build a range to replace the ones that had been pressured to close.The county, state and some local sportsmen's groups pooled $90,000 to build the range, which has become increasingly popular and crowded.The crack of pistols and the boom of black-powder guns echo across an uninhabited area surrounding Westminster's Northern Landfill -- one of the few places the county could find that wouldn't disturb Westminster's growing population.The range draws a wide range of shooters; on a recent afternoon, construction workers and college professors shot side by side. Shooting is heavily regimented, and strict rules are posted everywhere.It's nothing like the old days, said range supervisor Jim Cole, a lifelong gun enthusiast who moved to the area in 1963."In '63, you could pack up your guns, drive the back roads, shoot groundhogs and nobody cared," Cole said. "It was all wide open. Anybody could stop on the side of the road and shoot a few shots."Tensions between shooting ranges and suburbia have flared across the country, from Oregon to Ohio. Jim Baird, an expert on suburban sprawl for The Izaak Walton League, a national conservation group that has shooting ranges at about one-third of its 300 local chapters, said that as development moves farther away from urban centers, the fights will grow.According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Inventory, the pace of development between 1992 and 1997 was significantly higher than it was the entire previous decade. From 1982 to 1992, 1.4 million acres per year were developed around the country; from 1992 to 1997, the most recent year available, the number was 2.2 million acres per year.Ken Begly moved into a house near the Deep Run Rifle and Revolver Club in Carroll County in 1981 and said he knew what he was in for. But the gun club began to increase its activity, Begly said, and was soon shooting at all hours."The noise was so loud you couldn't even carry on a conversation on the phone," he said.Begly and a dozen neighbors sued the club, and after years of court battles, Deep Run has been effectively shut down. It has an appeal pending in Carroll County Circuit Court, but no one has discharged a gun at the site in more than a year, Begly said."It's finally a nice place to live again," he said. "I will never move near a gun range again, I'll tell you that." http://www.saveourguns.com/ c 2001 The Washington Post Company