The discussion of buying land where you can have your own personal range was interesting. One solution to this that is considerably cheaper and more convenient than buying a goo-gob of land in a gun-friendly area is to...
build your own UNDERGROUND firing range!
Seriously.
It's actually very cheap and easy, and you don't need nearly as much land as you would for an above-ground range. And if you make your underground range deep enough, no one will know you have it. What they don't know, they can't complain about....
What you do is rent a back hoe, and buy a bunch of 36" PVC pipe. Get 100 yards, or 200, or however long you want your range to be.
Dig down deep enough so that you have at least four feet of soil above your pipe. Every 10 feet, cut a hole in the pipe, about 8" in diameter. Here's where it gets a little tricky. What you want to end up with is to have lights every 10 feet or so. But you don't want to shoot them by accident. And you want to be able to change the bulbs. So you make the lights be _recessed_ , by attaching smaller "chimney" PVC to your main PVC, and hang the lights down that. The details I leave as an exercise for the reader.
You also need to rig up an electric target system.
And you need ventilation. Have the tubes which hold the lights double as vent holes, and rig up a network of fans, to make sure the air circulates. Draw in fresh air from the shooting end, and expel it out from the ports in the shooting tube.
It's also advisable to build in access hatches every N yards too, in case a target falls off and you need to retrieve it. Or so you can set up tin cans part way down, and do some plinking.
At the end where you're going to be shooting from, dig down below the level of the shooting tube far enough that you can stand up and have the shooting tube at a comfortable height.
You can put a generic tool shed or better yet, your garage, over the entrance. That way if anyone asks about the noise, you can say that you were in your workshop building a birdhouse, or working on your car, or whatever. (The noise will hopefully be muffled by the earth, so the birdhouse story might actually work).
There's actually a guy who did this in the vehemently anti-gun Silicon Valley CA area (Monte Sereno), and he gets away with it. Then again, he lives in a $15,000,000 house, so maybe he just "supports" the local politicans and Sheriff during their election campaigns, and in turn they look the other way.
There's also several guys in Colorado that have done this. They implied that it was actually relatively common in their area.
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On a related note, for those of you with teenage kids that like to play music REALLY LOUD, one really cool solution I saw (in a movie, but it looked feasible!) is to build them an underground club house in the back yard.
This time, instead of using a 36" PVC pipe, you actually get one of those HUGE concrete pipes, that are 8 feet in diameter. Get it about 15 feet long, with a manhole-sized hatch in it. Seal the ends of the pipe, rent a backhoe, and bury it in your back yard. You should actually be able to do this on a standard 60'x100' lot! I don't know about zoning, but from a mechanical point of view it would fit.
Rig up electricity (for the stereo, electric guitar, or whatever), build a floor, put in a couch, and rig up a lighting system. The top of the pipe will be about four feet below ground, and you'll need to install a pipe with a ladder mounted in it so that his son and his friends could climb down through the manhole, into the club house.
Oh yea, don't forget to add ventilation
With the price of electronics as low as they are now, you can also install a discreet closed-circuit camera if you want to keep tabs on your kids. Run the video feed back to the TV in your room. When they ask how you knew they were smoking pot down there, you can just tell them that you smelled it. Parents have superhuman senses.
build your own UNDERGROUND firing range!
Seriously.It's actually very cheap and easy, and you don't need nearly as much land as you would for an above-ground range. And if you make your underground range deep enough, no one will know you have it. What they don't know, they can't complain about....
What you do is rent a back hoe, and buy a bunch of 36" PVC pipe. Get 100 yards, or 200, or however long you want your range to be.
Dig down deep enough so that you have at least four feet of soil above your pipe. Every 10 feet, cut a hole in the pipe, about 8" in diameter. Here's where it gets a little tricky. What you want to end up with is to have lights every 10 feet or so. But you don't want to shoot them by accident. And you want to be able to change the bulbs. So you make the lights be _recessed_ , by attaching smaller "chimney" PVC to your main PVC, and hang the lights down that. The details I leave as an exercise for the reader.
You also need to rig up an electric target system.
And you need ventilation. Have the tubes which hold the lights double as vent holes, and rig up a network of fans, to make sure the air circulates. Draw in fresh air from the shooting end, and expel it out from the ports in the shooting tube.
It's also advisable to build in access hatches every N yards too, in case a target falls off and you need to retrieve it. Or so you can set up tin cans part way down, and do some plinking.
At the end where you're going to be shooting from, dig down below the level of the shooting tube far enough that you can stand up and have the shooting tube at a comfortable height.
You can put a generic tool shed or better yet, your garage, over the entrance. That way if anyone asks about the noise, you can say that you were in your workshop building a birdhouse, or working on your car, or whatever. (The noise will hopefully be muffled by the earth, so the birdhouse story might actually work).
There's actually a guy who did this in the vehemently anti-gun Silicon Valley CA area (Monte Sereno), and he gets away with it. Then again, he lives in a $15,000,000 house, so maybe he just "supports" the local politicans and Sheriff during their election campaigns, and in turn they look the other way.
There's also several guys in Colorado that have done this. They implied that it was actually relatively common in their area.
-----
On a related note, for those of you with teenage kids that like to play music REALLY LOUD, one really cool solution I saw (in a movie, but it looked feasible!) is to build them an underground club house in the back yard.
This time, instead of using a 36" PVC pipe, you actually get one of those HUGE concrete pipes, that are 8 feet in diameter. Get it about 15 feet long, with a manhole-sized hatch in it. Seal the ends of the pipe, rent a backhoe, and bury it in your back yard. You should actually be able to do this on a standard 60'x100' lot! I don't know about zoning, but from a mechanical point of view it would fit.
Rig up electricity (for the stereo, electric guitar, or whatever), build a floor, put in a couch, and rig up a lighting system. The top of the pipe will be about four feet below ground, and you'll need to install a pipe with a ladder mounted in it so that his son and his friends could climb down through the manhole, into the club house.
Oh yea, don't forget to add ventilation
With the price of electronics as low as they are now, you can also install a discreet closed-circuit camera if you want to keep tabs on your kids. Run the video feed back to the TV in your room. When they ask how you knew they were smoking pot down there, you can just tell them that you smelled it. Parents have superhuman senses.