Is the Second Amendment under fire in the West?
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“It comes down to safety. When things are getting so concentrated, you run the risk of safety concerns, and that’s what we’ve been seeing.” Reghan Cloudman, U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman
Legs crossed and gaze fixed firmly downrange, Benjamin White-Patarino settles himself onto the concrete and exhales. As he holds his breath, the afternoon wind dies and with it the rustle of the dry fall grasses. The world pauses for a moment, totally silent. BLAM. BLAM. Gunshots crack out in the silence. White-Patarino starts breathing again and stands as the wind resumes. He lowers his vintage rifle, an M1 Garand chambered in bullets as long as a finger. He breathes deeply for a few seconds, allowing oxygen to return to his muscles before he shoulders the 10-pound rifle, folds to the ground and takes aim again. BLAM. BLAM. Downrange, the lead bullets slam through a paper target and into the dirt hill behind, 10 shots in 80 seconds. Almost every
one of them rips through the target’s black center, which at this distance is smaller than a pencil eraser. No fancy scope or laser sights ease his shots, but White-Patarino needs neither. Years of practice honed in college and in competition have earned him the right to call himself a champion.
“That’s a good one,” he says to his mom, Pamela White, who clicks off her stopwatch as she observes his target practice from a safe distance.
A history buff, park ranger and champion marksman, White-Patarino, 28, finds himself on the front lines of an increasingly heated fight between shooters and the hikers, mountain bikers and mountain residents who want to see shooting curtailed on public lands.
All across the West, federal and state land managers are struggling to balance the demands of recreational shooters with the fear that their bullets are starting fires, frightening other land users and accidentally killing others. In some cases, land managers have enacted “temporary” shooting restrictions that have remained in effect for decades. Other government officials are trying to push recreational shooters onto a handful of developed shooting ranges such as the one White-Patarino uses while promising to build more if they can raise the money.
Many recreational shooters say only a small number of reckless people are to blame for the undeserved reputation their sport has acquired and that rangers should simply do a better job of enforcing existing rules, which already ban shooting near homes or limit the use of steel bullets or exploding targets. They’re worried government officials are unfairly targeting their long tradition of using public land for target practice in an area of the country known for hunting and gun-friendly cowboy culture.
Nowhere is the conflict more sharply felt than perhaps at Colorado’s Front Range, where 4.8 million people live, work and play at the junction of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. The stakes, quite literally, can be life and death.
In 2015, a grandfather camping with his family was killed by an errant bullet that came whizzing out of the darkness in the forest south of Denver. Two months earlier, a couple’s Jeep was hit by a bullet in that same area of the 3.1 million-acre Pike and San Isabel National Forest.
Since 2010, U.S. Forest Service officers have handled 8,500 shooting incidents across the country. Of those, 926 were in the Pike and San Isabel forest.
Existing regulations already ban dangerous shooting, shooting near homes or shooting across roads. But there’s almost no one to actually enforce that: The Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest northwest of Denver, for instance, is bigger than Delaware but patrolled by only four U.S. Forest Service officers, although local sheriffs and unarmed rangers help out.
In many cases, the solution has been blanket bans, most often implemented during the hot, dry summer months when wildfire danger increases rapidly.
Even without fire restrictions, finding a place that’s safe for White-Patarino’s powerful rifle – and where no one will complain about the noise – is getting harder. The private rifle club near his home charges hundreds of dollars a year to belong, once you’ve waited years for a spot to open up.
“Being able to shoot and compete with a rifle that was used to defend our freedom is really interesting and important to me,” White-Patarino says. “You’re really interacting with a piece of history.”
Like many shooters, White-Patarino has been watching with frustration as large swaths of the West evolve away from everyday gun use. Millions of city dwellers from the more liberal East and West coasts are moving here, bringing their opposition to open carrying of firearms, to hunting and to public shooting.
“In the shooting community, there’s an understanding that potentially every bullet has a lawyer attached to it,” said Ryan Elliott, a recreational shooter who is also a fire investigator for the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada. “Unfortunately, it only takes a few people to spoil it for everybody else.”
That’s the challenge shooters face: A single bullet can kill or spark a devastating wildfire that destroys homes, ruins forests and taints drinking water.
Retiree Don Simpson knows that all too well. His log cabin sits on private land near the border of the Arapaho- Roosevelt forest in northern Colorado. A few years ago, someone fired a shot that slammed into his window frame and dropped to the sill.
“I thought, gosh, that’s the bathroom window,” Simpson said. “A couple of inches either way and it could have hit somebody.”
Simpson, who considers himself a friend of recreational shooters, shared photos of the bullet and damage with federal officials considering a plan to dramatically restrict shooting on public lands across a large portion of Colorado’s Front Range in return for building a small number of public ranges.
Shooters across the West who have seen that plan fear government officials in their states will take it even further by permanently banning shooting in places where shooters have been firing for generations. Eight of the 10 fastest-growing states are in the West, and most have significant amounts of public lands that traditionally been open to shooting: Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Washington, Arizona, Texas, Colorado and Oregon, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. All those new residents need homes to live in and land to recreate on, and the pressure is squeezing shooters.
“It comes down to safety,” said Reghan Cloudman, a U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman. “When things are getting so concentrated, you run the risk of safety concerns, and that’s what we’ve been seeing.”
The proposal in Colorado, which is being closely watched by recreational shooters across the West, would permanently halt sport shooting on 225,574 acres of the most heavily used national forest in northern Colorado. While the number of acres is relatively small, the areas targeted for closure contain many of the most popular and easily accessible shooting sites. Those are also the sites closest to homes and roads.
Recreational shooters see the Northern Front Range Recreational Sport Shooting Management Partnership as an indicator of things to come, when regulators spend more time listening to new residents and ignoring longstanding traditions.
“We’re starting to see significant closures of recreational shooting on public lands, and that’s a major concern for our agency,” said JT Romatzke, the north- west regional manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
Romatzke’s agency recently opened a shooting range in western Colorado, but it’s more than 200 miles west of the state’s largest city, Denver.
Baldini, 55, a northern Colorado resident and recreational shooter who is frustrated by the growing restrictions, said he needs to shoot on public land outside formal ranges because he likes to target shoot at distances up to a mile, far longer than what’s available at most ranges. The best option for him, he said, is public land.
Recreational shooting has rapidly gained popularity in recent years. From 2012 to 2014, the number of people shooting recreationally jumped more than 24 percent but has leveled off in the past several years. Today, about 49.4 million Americans shoot recreationally, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
Baldini has closely followed the proposed restrictions in Colorado and wishes rangers would better enforce existing rules instead of punishing everyone.
The problem is one of numbers. Because so many people like to shoot, even a “few bad apples” represent a massive risk potential.
Elliot, the BLM Nevada fire investigator, likes to say that if shooters think there’s a one in a million chance they’ll start a fire, then it would take less than a month to do just that on the 12 million-acre district he patrols.
Authorities have tried to reduce the risk by banning exploding targets and tracer rounds, which are often the cause of fires.
But while exploding targets and tracer bullets often make headlines for starting fires, another cause traces back to President Barack Obama’s tenure, when many gun owners to begin hoarding ammunition. Ammo dealers ran out of regular bullets and began selling cheap steel-cored ammo from Russian-bloc countries. Steel-core bullets are usually banned during wildfire season, but many gun owners who bought that cheap ammo are now using it for target shooting – and unaware they’re firing steel, which is far more likely to start fires than lead bullets, Elliott said.
“It’s surprising that we don’t have more fires when you look at this in that context,” said Elliott, who carries a magnet to help show shooters the difference in ammo.
“You’re really interacting with a piece of history.” Benjamin White-Patarino Recreational shooter