OMG! A School Near A Shooting Range! OMG!

1. The range was there before you, if you dont like it GTFO.

   • That’s about the size of it…

     • +2

   • Same thing with airports. Kinda hard to hide airplanes taking off and landing but some morons will buy the house then immediately sue to shut it down. Sheesh!

     • I’ve always thought housing near airports ought to be subsidized low cost housing for the deaf.

       • Nothing should be subsidized with other people’s money unless that money was freely given. Taxing me to pay somebody else’s bills is theft.

       • Believe it or not, the former mayor of Toledo, Ohio, made that very suggestion several years ago. BTW, he was EXTREMELY anti-firearms Freedom. I had a great time doing battle with him.

   • sad thing is, it doesnt always work out that way.

     my local range was closed for half of the year due to the RENTERS next door complaining that bullets were hitting their house. (they werent).

     • Well in all fairness, there is a bit of a difference between loud noises and “INCOMING!”

       That it was all over an untrue statement sucks, though. We had a post a few months ago about a Georgia range that was forced to close because of stray rounds hitting a nearby home. That one actually had photographed bullet holes.

     • In the berkshires (MA) some idiot called the cops on the nearby gun range because he said it sounded like bullets hitting his roof. The cops went over to the range and got stupid and told the guys to leave. I heard it was actually squirrels dropping nuts on the guys roof. To hit the guys house you would have to be firing bullets like the rifle was an artillery piece.

   • Donna Dressel.

     DD.

     I think we’ve uncovered Miss Debbie Downers’ TRUE identity!

     To the bat, err, gunmobile!

2. What would you say if there was a shooting range next door to your high school?

   If I was still in school, I’d ask my teach if I could go next door for some practice after I was finished with my work… wait – that would be a age long passed by. If I said that in today’s time I would be detained by school security, my lockers and vehicle searched, and I would discuss disciplinary action while waiting for the parents to arrive.

   • It’s a sad sad time we live in. I’m in between being old and young; I used to keep my potato cannon in the back of my jeep so my friends and I could shoot spuds during our off period nearby at the local off-road spots.

   • “…an age long…” Your teacher should not have let you go shooting if you’re still making that mistake. 😉

   • I think it would be great because our local high school has a skeet team. The team now has to travel to the range to practice. It would be a win all the way around.

3. It’s bullshit like this that really pissed me off. The range is not a nuisance AND it was there first.

   • A similar thing happens when the suburbs bump up against agriculture — people love the idyllic ideal until they realize that farmyards have their own distinct smell (and sounds) and harvesting crops produces dust and noise. Far too much of society has been far too distant from natural human activities for far too long.

     • True that. It’s garbage mentality like that is driving me closer to being a recluse. I don’t want to be because of idvidual people, but because of socialtal norms. I just miss well stocked bars and other things good cities can offer, which isn’t much.

4. No doubt in my mind they’ll get the range shut down. These people know they can pull enough heartstrings (and purse strings) to get it done easily and the range probably can’t afford the legal protection.

   • Probably not in this case. City officials are firmly supporting the range, and so is the school district. It’s just a handful of pissy neighbors whinging about shotguns they can barely hear, and the rest of the town seems to be ignoring them.

     • And I think that if Iowa has a “Lemon Law” of and rigor, the real estate agent who sold those homes and didn’t mention the range down the road should be looking for another venue about now. Or if they did mention that factoid and these hipsters bought anyway and sue, the judge will tell them to just STFU and live with it.

     • I don’t even know why they complain about them. I actually miss that sound. When I was stationed in GA my property sat in a pasture between two farms with nothing but forest behind. I heard gunshots constantly. There was also an indoor range right across the street from a school and right next to a bar and bowling alley. Nobody cared. It was great.

       • The overlords want the peasants to go feral so that they’re easy to train.

5. I freaking hate these idiotic “NIMBY” who don’t do due diligence when purchasing a home. In my area, they’ve tried for years to shut down a small, private airfield and a racetrack. Both which have been there for 50+ years.

6. A former location of my work office was just down the street from a local trap and skeet club.

   Close enough that I could hear them in the parking lot. It always made me wonder why I was spending so much time at work.

   Good times: We used to take interns to the range at lunch time!

7. I had interviews for pt school at a couple schools and one had a shooting range across the street. It was so awesome. At one of the next interviews, I spoke with a girl I had seen at the last interview and we talked about the schools we had applied to. She went right to “I don’t know about that school it has a shooting range across from it” haha I think we were on opposite sides of that fence.

8. The same mentality is everywhere, a year or so ago I had one of my new neighbors ask me to sign their petition to try and force Long Beach Airport to move it’s landing pattern because it was disturbing them, the airport has been there since 1923, it’s not like it was a secret.

   • Long Beach isn’t far from the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station. In the late ’70’s, when I was in the Navy, the good citizens of the surrounding suburbs tried to get that shut down, because the nuclear weapons stored there (not that Seal Beach admitted they were) might explode. It was pushed mainly by developers who expected to get the land for development. Seal Beach was fortunate enough to have large, swampy areas within it’s boundaries, which it was able to get declared a waterfowl refuge, or migratory bird refuge or something like that, I don’t know what. But the developers seemed lost interest after that happened, at least for a while. The courts also agreed with the Navy that the people moving into the suburbs and then complaining should have thought about what was on the Naval Weapons Station before they bought.

     • Love the weapons station, I drive through it (yes, there’s a public road cutting through the middle of it) every day going to work. Makes me all warm and fuzzy knowing there’s so much whoopass in my immediate vicinity. Murricuh.

9. We passed legislation here in Tennessee to specifically prevent things like this from shutting down our long established ranges. My range is beside a school, a daycare, and surrounded by a 1000+ house neighborhood.

   We did, to be a good neighbor, stop shooting tannerite.

10. I have to wonder how many noise complaints the city has received.

    In particular, I wonder how many they’ve gotten when the range wasn’t even in use…

11. These are despicable, arrogant, self-righteous facists, so certain of their privileged status because they’re “progressive” that they think they can impose their whims on everyone else around them. I live in a semi-rural part of a county in Washington state and I see the same file creatures. Many have bought their “dream house” next to one or another farm, and come planting and harvest times, can’t stand the dust and noise. Notwithstanding that the dust and tractor noise should have been a factor in their considerations, they are determined to prevent anything from interfering with their “dream house” (until they find the next dream house) and instead of selling out and moving, petition the county to get a farm, which has existed for a century or more before they moved in, declared a nuisance, or a health hazard for all the dust, noise and pesticide fumes (which may not really exist if the farmer is organic. No matter). They’re despicable. And they need to be opposed at every council meeting.

    • I’d make sure my bulls were doing their business in in site of the offended twits.

      • That’ll learn ’em.
        🙂

    • @A.C.
      You left out “greedy”.

      Many of these homeowners and property holders are trying to enhance their property values by forcing the “nuisance” out after having bought at a reduced price because of close proximity to the existing “undesirable” activity.

      In San Diego County we have homeowners and developers who have tried, failed and continue to try to get ranges, a quarry, and airports shut down or their activities curtailed to the point of insolvency for the sole purpose of enhancing their property values.

      Pure greed; in each case the person or people demanding relief were fully aware of the existing activities prior to purchasing the adjacent real property.

12. The NRA range sourcebook says that the maximum range for #9 shot is 176 yards; 198 yards for #8, and 209 for #7 1/2.

    • I keep a spreadsheet that does ballistic simulations for different sizes of shot given muzzle velocity and elevation angle, and that seems to be in good agreement with what it tells me – anything 7-1/2 and smaller with typically available muzzle velocities will fall to earth within 200m (220 yds) no matter what the elevation angle.

13. “Had I known there was a gun club back there, I probably wouldn’t have bought the home.”

    I guess that the homeowner was transported to the new home while blindfolded and wearing earmuffs. Isn’t it amazing that Schmuck, oops, excuse me, Schuck hears the gunfire constantly, EXCEPT when he was inspecting the house.

    Hey, Schuck, oops, I mean Schmuck, you’re a lying jagoff.

    • I was laughing at the same thing. Then I thought, hmmm, the realtor probably only scheduled open houses during off times for the range.

14. I moved next to an airport. Now I want the airport shut down. And don’t say I should have known. I’m a liberal, and so I am expected and allowed to be ignorant.

    • LOL!

    • @ greatUnknown
      Maybe some little airplane will overfly your house and dump a full load of avgas which will ignite when the vapor reaches your water heater pilot and blow up the whole place.

      He He!
      😉

15. This reminds me of how grateful I am to live in Alaska, where the ratio of those who appreciate guns to those who don’t is much higher than in most other places.

    We have a makeshift range literally in our back yard; everyone in the vicinity knows it, knows us, and LOVES to come by and join us for a shooting session on a nice day since it’s so much cheaper than a membership to the Fish & Game owned ranges in the area.

    • Okay, I know that Alaska is really great — my old man loved it — but how do you keep your balls from icing up?

      • Handwarmer packets in my britches 😉

        Only sometimes. The weather isn’t bad. Brutal, yes. Intolerable, no. It has a lot to do with the humidity; dry air doesn’t feel as cold as humid air, even though it may read as being the same temperature.

        It’s been down about 5 below the last several days, and today’s high was around 17 and it started snowing, and I made the comment to a friend of mine “oh finally, it’s warm enough to snow!” Then I thought it over and realized how funny that sounds…

        In all seriousness though, you get used to it. Once you’ve been outside in zero to negative 10 for a few weeks, 15 degrees starts to feel like sweatshirt weather, no joke.

        • I’ve spend time in North Dakota, I can attest to that.

          After weeks without end of temperatures in the negatives, 20 degrees F in later March-early April felt like summer…

        • ND born here. Ya sure you betcha – above freezing?
          Thats when the old scandies start to take their clothes off for sunbathing, uff da!

        • I remember shoveling snow in shirtsleeves at -5 one Winter in Minot while the in-laws from Long Island were visiting. Suddenly a huge pile of clothes with my father-in-law inside appeared and announced that I would freeze to death. Of course, I ignored him.

        • I spent 5 1/2 years at K.I. Sawyer AFB in Upper Michigan. My brother was stationed at Elmendorf AFB, Anchorage, Alaska, during that period, and we usually had colder weather than he did, plus we got more snow. And we had VERY few, if any, antigun lefties (except, of course, those in Marquette Branch state prison).

      • Mactown (McMurdo Station) in the Ross Sea, a soft 7 from Antarctica, has about the same climate as Fairbanks. It’s a bit chillier in Spring when all that -80 degree air on the plateau comes by for a visit, but the winter averages -40 except during storms when it can go up to 0.

        I went in shirtsleeves routinely.

        • Wow. Very cool.

16. Being an Austinite who enjoys live music, there is no kind of resident I hate worse that those who move into a location, ostensibly to take advantage of any culture or amenities present, and then complain, ad nauseum about said culture and amenities until they are either shut down or forcefully conformed to said resident wishes and expectations. Fuck those people.

    • Move downtown, where the nightlife is! Restaurants, bars, nightclubs, theatres! All the entertainment you can stomach!

      Oh, and all those things make noise on the nights you prefer to spend a quiet night at home, too. That’s the tradeoff. Suck it up.

      It’s like people who move to the country “where it’s quiet” and then bitch about having to drive an hour to the grocery store, or that the nearest QuikMart is 10 minutes away at highway speeds.

      • Fifteen minutes at an average of 35 MPH, and it’s a damned pretty drive of which I’ll never tire.

17. I don’t know how Iowa works, but where I’m from the location of a new school wouldn’t have been asurprise (anyone know why a phone would refuse to space?)

    There would have been planning commission meetings, school board meetings, city council meetings….

    Then, when they actually decided to build a school, they’d have to ask for a millage increase to pay for it. That would be on a ballet describing exactly what it was for.

    All of the above would also be covered on local TV and the daily fishwrapper.

    I would think these people had at least SOME forewarning that a school was being built, where it was being built, and it definitely sounds like the range was already there.

    Sounds like people too ignorant to know the proper times to raise dissent are now just bitching…..

    • Sometimes ttag comments does that on my galaxy s3. I just finish typing so the two words drop to the next line then touch where I want the space.

      • My S2 Skyrocket does the same thing. I figured it was SwiftKey acting up. I usually just back out of the comment and start over, because when it happens to me, it doesn’t happen just once, but throughout that particular comment.

        • When it happens to me it’s usually just once, and seemingly random. It’s annoying, but I figure the worst that will happen is a “lern 2 spell lolz” comment.

          Besides, with my thumb typing skills some days I’m just glad to have punctuation….

18. Some years ago, I was president of a Rod & gun club located in a small town on Boston’s north shore. Although the club’s range had been active for nearly 20 years, some people had recently built a house on a hill about 1/4 mile behind our range, and had complained to the local board of selectmen about the “incessant noise and stray bullets flying through our yard.” I presented the selectmen with sound meter readings from the complainants’ property, plus aerial photographs of their house in relation to the range. It turned out that these characters were serial litigants, but it still took nearly a year to get them to give up their complaints and, eventually, move to another state.

    • I’m in the process of moving. One of the houses we looked at (really nice place) is directly accross the street from Wright-Patterson AFB. While we were walking through they were doing touch and gos with a C-5. I wonder if I bought and complained about jet noise if they’d shut it down….

      • If I was close enough to the USAF Museum there, I’d have my name on a parking spot. Magnificent place!

        • Roger that! My uncle was commandant there at Wright-Pat for a while before he retired. Before the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy museum opened outside of DC, the Wright-Pat USAF museum was the best aerospace museum in the world.

          And since Udvar-Hazy opened, the Wright-Pat USAF museum is *still* the best aerospace museum in the world. But not as easy to get into these days.

19. This reminds me of the people that live next to our Naval Air Stations and Air Force Bases and complain about the noise of the jets landing and taking off. Well, dipstick, nobody forced you to move there.

    • I LOVE the sound of jets, not sure why. They go by and all of the sudden my pants are much tighter than they were a minute prior.

    • I can just see it:

      “Damn! The NSF sent me to fu¢kin’ Antarctica!!!

      “Mebbe I cin get God t’ do somethin’ ’bout all the snow…”

    • Libs complaining about the sound of freedom. Hope it drives them nucken futz.

20. I have shot at that range. They have great 5 stand sporting clays and some raised birds. You really have to snake your way back from the highway to get to the range. Waukee is expanding at a geometric rate but that is no reason to push out the established shotgun club. If I remember correctly its a private club. The only public range within 20 miles of Des Moines/Waukee is the DNR range up in Polk City. They have public hunting ground all around them and still get complaints from the neighbors about the sounds of the range. The same goes for complaints about noise from the Military range at Camp Dodge in Johnston. An army base there for over 100 years and the people who built a golf course next to it in the 80s are now complaining about the quality of life they have living next door to a base. LOL.

21. Second paragraph, second sentence you used knows instead of known. Next to last paragraph, second sentence, “Newcomers aren’t not” instead of are not or aren’t.

    • Text amended. Gracias.

22. If I was a local homeowner, I’d be very happy to have a range nearby but I’d be very unhappy if I had to live anywhere near a school.

    • yup. living next to a school is like living next to a walmart.

      crowded, noisy, and all these little crotchfruit disrespecting property.

      • You do have “KEEP OFF THE GRASS” signs up don’t you?

        Ya gotta also have a stick that you can shake in the air while you yell
        “get outta my yard, can’t you read the sign?”

        Damn whipper snappers.

        Are you in your 70’s or 80’s?

        • Nowadays the stick is optional. It is perfectly acceptable to shake your fist whilst shouting ‘you kids get offa my lawn!’

          • Besides, if you had a stick, someone would probably report a MWAG.

    • I have lived next to a school and I currently live next to a spot on public land that is sometimes used for shooting. Both can be annoying at times but the school is worse. The kids can be obnoxious but the parents and parking are terrible, especially when there is some meeting or event. I have actually had people parallel park across the end of my driveway and couldn’t get my car out to leave.

      • “I have actually had people parallel park across the end of my driveway and couldn’t get my car out to leave.”
        Two alternative solutions:
        – Have them towed at their expense
        – Get a logging chain and move their car. Sideways.

      • Get an old F-350 with a turbo diesel, and you won’t have that problem.

23. I live next to this website & I would like this shit hole shut down.

    • No, you live in Canada, and your wishes carry no weight here. Also, banned.

      • For some reason David Spade and “buh bye” just popped into my head….

        • Yeah, he’s been around for a while, posting under Moran b eeghuzzar, mrknowitall, and most recently, “you know who.” Under the first and last names, he never once posted a comment that could be classified as “useful” or “contributing to the conversation,” but instead they were all either derogatory or just downright stupid. He did manage a couple cogent posts under the mrknowitall name, but after the other two got banned, he started creating multiple sock-puppet names, so he’s IP-banned now. He may show back up, because proxies aren’t hard to figure out, but that’s fine, he’ll just get deleted on sight at this point.

          The really funny part was after the “Moran” name got banned, he continued to post comments, several dozen in fact, seemingly completely unaware that they were all going straight into the Spam folder. He was the internet version of the guy standing on a street corner ranting at nobody.

          • I’ve found a couple of other forums (or whatever they are these days) where I do that; TTAG is about guns. 🙂

        • Yeah, hopefully he’s too stupid to figure out proxies…

    • Is that you Shannon? Dirk! Dirk! Where is Dirk!?

      • I miss Dirk.

        • I do too. Did he leave?
          Shane! I mean Dirk! come back, Dirk!

          • Sadly, he hasn’t been seen since the 16th, the day of the Anti-Flaming Comments Policy post. We miss him.

        • Wheres MikeB2000? His troll comments generated almost as many hits as all of RF’s, Nick’s, and my own posts combined. I wish he’d come over to The Truth About Knives to troll for a while. I’d even send him some test spatulas as thank-you gifts.

          But not real knives: I wouldn’t want him to slash his wrists with anything sharp.

        • MikeB302000 finally gained so much weight from sitting on his fat ass that he developed his own gravitational field, attracted a comet, and it smoked him.

        • I seem to remember Dirk posting after the anti flame post, maybe it was the same day…..

          Perhaps the fame got to him…..

24. I remember in the 90’s a bunch of outside agitators, I mean, community organizers whining and crying about minorities who have to live next door to landfills and endure that atrocious stench and it’s all oh so racist. Well.

    Landfills, in many areas, not unlike gun ranges and airports, were established decades ago and often in the then-middle-of-nowhere. People buy the nearby property cheaply because, well, there’s this undesirable feature nearby. Adjacent property either wasn’t worth much to begin with, or whatever loss in value it may have undergone was endured by a long ago prior owner, not you here today. You don’t get to claim a loss that you never incurred, since your low purchase price already reflects the proximity to the dump down the street. And you certainly don’t get to be the johnny-come-lately who tells everyone else to go away.

25. There are some localities that are actually passing laws specifically prohibiting nuisance lawsuits by more recent residents against existing gun ranges. I wrote about one in Washington state a few weeks back in the Digest. It’s important to get ahead of them like this because in most cases, the gun ranges don’t have the finances to fight a lawsuit, even if they’d ultimately win, so they’re forced to close.

26. The wonderful state of SC has a law specifically prohibiting the idiot neighbors from suing an existing shooting range. Maybe that should be replicated in Iowa.

27. At the end of the day, sooner or later the range will lose. If only the egg came before the chicken argument worked, the sad fact is local governments are greedy. What brings in more $$$ a gun club thats been there for decades or lots of nice new houses they can tax. So they force the gun clubs/ranges out, build hoses where the range used to be and bring home more tax $$$$

28. I absolutely hate people that move in and complain. I remember when the neighbors to raceway park complained and tried to have the race track shut down. Needless to say people sent death threats to the mcmansions and politicians. The track is still there.

29. My cousin is a teacher in this district and my church meets in the existing middle school a few hundred yards away from where they are building this new one, so I am very aware of this situation. I worry that a few bad apples may make this a bad deal for the shooting club.

30. We had a range inside my high school 😉

31. The Middle and High Schools where I grew up was kiddy-corner to a fairly famous Maximum Security Penitentiary that included a firing range for the corrections officers. To my knowledge nothing bad has ever come of it. People like this don’t deserve these stupid articles.

32. In the northern Sydney suburb of Hornsby, there is a rifle range beside a hospital. They even share the driveway entrance. A walking track passes through the safety template zone behind the buttstop berm, but has to be closed when the range is in operation.

    • I know that range, it’s been there since the middle of not the last century but the one begore and the hospital was a defence rehabilitation place then got sold to private health with one condition – don’t mention or whine about the range….. ever.

33. I have a trap and skeet range about a mile away as the crow as the crow flies, on good nights, when the breeze is blowing my way, I can tell which game they’re playing.
    3gun Annie has been very popular lately.
    Had a citizen complain a few years ago. Instead of calling her, I stopped by. She was wringing her hands, all kinds of upset. I told her I thought it was a beautiful sound. The sound of freedom. She looked at me like I grew a third eye or something.
    Weird.

34. The problem with Waukee and the other Des Moines sub-burbs is the influence of former Chicago suburbanites. They left the suburb they lived in because they turned it into a crap-hole they then hated. Moved to Iowa and found a better job and a lower cost of living. Then they proceed to try to make their new home into a crappier version of the crap-hole they hated so much.

35. About that ‘coming to the nuisance’ thing… tell that to the Shuffletown Dragway that USED to be just North of Charlotte, NC.

36. Unfortunately, “people” can be real morons.

    I’ve always been especially amused by the “How DARE they put a glide path over my house 50 years before it was built?!?” bit.

    You can’t fix stupid, but with a lottaluck you can vote it outta office.

37. The local highschool is putting in an improved archery range, and is considering target pistols as well.

    That they’re seriously considering this gives me all kinds of warm fuzzys.

    Kansas: the Free State.

38. Same issue for people that move near the airpoort and complain about the noise. One of our crazy mayors in a nearby large city suggested that only deaf people buy houses near the airport. Yep and he had other issues of assault also.

39. Bet ya that this will be one of the SAFEST schools in the nation.

40. A range I belong to is 200m to the front door of the local JH and HS. (according to google maps) That range is for shotguns, handguns and rifles. It’s across the road and facing away from the school (obviously) but if you aim high enough, you could rain on a subdivision half a mile behind the range. They’re obviously very strict about all targets being placed inside the bunkers and warn new members of being stripped of their membership if they’re ever caught not being COMPLETELY compliant with range rules. But it’s a great example of a range within corporation limits that hasn’t hurt anyone and hasn’t caused a school to be peppered with bullet holes. but of course, it could all change that one day someone isn’t in complete control of having their booger hook off the boom switch and a ND causes the range to be moved or completely shut down

41. There was a range in my middle school under the gym and I belonged to a rifle club there growing up in the 90’s. We shot rifles in school… IN SCHOOL.
    And it was OK.

    Also, if the range has been there for 50 years and these people don’t like it, why are they building a school there? That’s like planting a garden in the desert then complaining that it’s dry. What kind of an idiot comes up with a plan like that?
    If you don’t like it, build the school somewhere else.
    Or just cease with the irrational panic already.

    • Once (in about 1966) we did a school play with a big battle scene where they used at least one hunting rifle, one shotgun, which kids had brought from home, and about a half-dozen homemade nichrome/black powder flashpots. The guy with the shotgun fired it into a 55-gal clearing barrel to simulate artillery and/or bombs, and I happened to be standing behind the guy standing in the wings with the rifle. He aimed it about 6 or 8 feet to the side of the guy who was going to get “shot”, and I saw the wadding stop about 6 or 8 feet from the muzzle of the rifle. The guy fell off the platform onto a pile of mattresses. It was Kewl!

42. Many years ago we built a new home on 5 acres within 1500 feet of the Santa fe Main line between Albuquerque and El Paso. At times it could be noisy, sometimes with switching going on, sometimes a loco just sitting there idling for hours (hardly noticeable) and sometimes a long train hightailing through at 50 mph. They even blew the whistle at crossings in the MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. Now we live far from trains, interstate highways or airports. I don’t miss the interstates at all but we miss the trains and planes. How many live close to interstate highways? They are NOISY all night long. I have not heard of anyone trying to shut them down. So there. Not everybody can live far away from all these major parts of our commercial society.

43. The siting of this school smacks of premeditation & a specific agenda.

    Bloody socialists.

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