I am not suggesting taking away 2nd amendment rights. This post has nothing to do with that.
Currently, in the U.S. anyone can go out onto National Forest or BLM land and target practice. Those lands are also used by campers, hikers, OHV riders, etc.
The target practice areas are everywhere. At nearly every single pullout in a forest you can find shell casings, trash that was used to shoot at, and even easy to spot shotgun shell hulls. Occasionally, I found live rounds as well.
If you are camping it’s almost impossible to find a spot where you don’t hear constant gunfire. So, noise pollution is everywhere.
If you browse some of the websites/apps dedicated to finding free camping spots you will sometimes see reviews where people say that the target practice folk were not careful with which direction they were shooting and that bullets were coming close to the trails or camping locations. You can imagine this to be true when you see how nearly every pullout has signs of previous shooting.
I have been in numerous National Forests: including: Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, South Dakota, Colorado, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington…you get the picture. I have been to a lot of forests and BLM land and every one of them sounds like militias are there preparing for the next war. And every one has target practice trash.
In my opinion, Oregon is the worst state for gunfire noise pollution and target practice trash and shell casings everywhere. I never found a single camping space in Oregon where I could not hear people shooting in the background.
So, all I am suggesting is that you take some acres in a corner somewhere in every forest and make a gun range. This would keep the noise and trash in one place and would also allow the forest rangers and BLM to police the areas and enforce rules and safety.
Preach. For one thing, it’s something that shouldn’t need regulating, but unfortunately not every gun owner has any sense at all. That’s what regulations are for, to keep the idiots from fucking over the rest of us.
For another, the impact of shooting isn’t limited to casings and trash. Even the noise isn’t as big a problem as the other effects. Lead, the powder residues, the damage to trees and other plant life. If the activity of target shooting, which is going to cause the most problems environmentally, isn’t limited in location, you can’t really clean up effectively. Even shooting into a natural soil backdrop isn’t without problems for the soil and surrounding life.
And the project could partially fund itself no more broken glass and other trash, you use a recyclable paper target or gtfo. Sell those targets. Charge a small cleanup fee for use as well. Keep it cheap enough that anyone who can afford ammo can afford to use the site, then make the fines for target shooting elsewhere on public lands as big as you can realistically hope to collect.
Mind you, it would need that kind of system, because the rangers sure as hell don’t have the manpower or resources to do it with what’s already there. You couldn’t just put up a sign either, it would have to be supervised to some degree. So you’d need to secure initial funding to set things up, add personnel, and make people aware. Wouldn’t be cheap, and I doubt it would ever break even, but it could be done without being a massive money sink, I think.