The Bear wrote:Lastly, a minimum distance from shooter to target to cut down the angle and keep the bullets in the traps. Our minimum distance is 15'.
I'm a member of a commercial range that caters to the concealed carry crowd. I looked really funny and out of place on the firing line yesterday, holding a Tompkins free pistol (Christmas present from my sis) in one hand and shooting at targets 25 yards away. I'm used to the stares. :-)
However, the range makes a great deal of income from concealed carry classes. Since my state requires a firing test that starts at 3 yards, the range simply can't put a reasonable minimum distance requirement in their rules. Ultimately, there's lots of unintentional cross-lane firing but nobody really cares since nearly all targets are between 3 and 10 yards. Only crazy people like me with targets at the far end of the range are bothered and there aren't enough of us to justify getting in the face of all the regular customers.
To someone who wants to see all range behavior tightly controlled, this places looks just unsafe enough to make you queasy. However, they've managed to find a compromise between driving away customers and tight control without sacrificing safety to any unacceptable degree. (As an aside to folks who say "safety must never be compromised" - that's ridiculous. You compromise your safety every time you get in a car. All intelligent security procedures are designed to reduce risk to an acceptable degree, not eliminate it. Elimination is impossible, always, and any attempt to do so is always ridiculously expensive.)
Here's how they run things -
There are two ranges - a pistol range and an "anything" range. The rules are ostensibly the same but the ability to partition off some shooters to the rifle side, where the lanes are wider, the lane dividers much more dense, etc., gives them some latitude to be more or less tight, depending on the situation.
No rapid fire. The rule is right up there on the board. During the evenings when every lane is filled and there's an hour wait to get a slot, they enforce the rule. On a dead weekday morning when they know everyone on the firing line by name, the rule is ignored. This is more true, more often, on the rifle side where the full-auto firing is allowed. It's kinda tough to tell anyone they can't do rapid fire when the guy next to them just let loose with a 50-round burst from a rifle rented to them by the range.
They sweep the floor constantly. When they run across steel-cased ammo, the tell the user to cut it out because it's against the rules. The steel cases get dumped in the trash. They don't let the cases build up on the floor so long that a few steel cases become a sorting problem for them when dealing with their brass recycler.
They're nice. Most range owners have seen so much crap that they've gotten crusty. These guys make a huge effort to be nice. If someone doesn't know what they're doing, those customers don't hesitate to ask for help. This creates an atmosphere of trust with the customers and also a realization that an employee might be right behind you, watching you, at any time, since they're always coming onto the range to help folks.
They use steel overhead baffles but also hang wood from them. Thus, if a shot goes way high, a shower of wood will fall in that lane. Most often, an employee will stop by with a kind and friendly "Hi, how's it going, anything I can do to help?" that will often be followed by a 10 or 15-minute personalized training session on firearms basics. All very friendly, all designed to turn a dangerously inaccurate shooter into someone who can at least stay on paper at 5 yards.
The construction of the range is a concrete box. Shots into the floor or side walls produce no real damage. The backstop catches everything. The overhead tracks are the only downrange components that are in any danger and this commercial range simply accepts that daily repairs are part of the cost of doing business. They went with a great compromise on type of target return mechanism. They didn't go with bare cables that flop around (God, I hate that!) and can be cut with a single errant round. Nor did they go with something ridiculously overbuilt that would be expensive to repair if it was hit with AP ammo. Instead, they have a simple V-channel overhead with an "out and back" toggle switch. The worst possible damage would be if a shotgun slug were to hit right at a junction of the V-track; that could knock down a section of the overhead. This actually happened once, meaning that lane closed for the rest of the day. It was fixed before the start of business the next day.
Generally, then, the policies of this range are to be available and watchful to take care of idiots, build facilities that can withstand the level of abuse expected from the targeted demographic, and be flexible. As a result, to a dedicated, high-level NRA or ISSF competitor, the place might look like a mildly dangerous dump. But for the general public and the people that run this range, things work well.
I realize that the OP was asking about a private club range that probably isn't staffed full-time, but I still think there are some good principles in play at my local commercial range.