Saturday, August 22, 2015

...and what's beyond it.

"Martin, 60, camping with his family, was killed by a stray shot, possibly fired a mile away. What Healy only mentions very, very late in the article, is that five shooters questioned by Bureau of Land Management police voluntarily allowed their weapons to be tested. None of them fired the fatal shot. The investigation continues.

This is less a problem here in New England where we’re acutely conscious of the borders of our small parcels of land, and there aren’t that many large swaths of land owned by the Federal Government and managed nihilistically by BLM’s Luddite urban environmentalists. But what happened to this poor fellow Glenn Martin was no less than the predictable consequence of a shot fired over a backstop, and we shooters as a community earn the opprobrium Healy and his readers heap upon us, any time we let one go like that."
Backstops and what lies beyond them are a thing in which I am acutely interested. The range where I shoot the most is the opposite of being out on BLM land. When the topic of banning .500 S&W Magnum came up recently, I was initially opposed, on the idea that there's not really much practical difference ballistically between a 240gr .429" bullet and a 375gr .500" one once they've gone parabolic. What got me to reluctantly agree was the fact that the long-barreled S&W .500 will actually double in the hands of inexperienced shooters, making it that much more likely for one to get over the berm in the first place.

I'd like to think that people are responsible enough to police themselves, but the fact remains that, despite a pretty clear policy on what type of firearms are allowed, we occasionally find 7.62x54R brass out there.
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