Do you think it's excessive to spend five MILLION dollars on a shooting range?
The Charlottesville and Albemarle Police depts. are wanting their own private shooting range because they are tired of being embarrassed by all the accidental shootings that have taken place at the local public shooting range. Virtually ALL the accidental shootings of each other and themselves and of houses in the area have been by police and deputies. They want to spend five million dollars on their own private shooting range. That's the money that belongs to the public. Is that excessive or not?
Steve N2013-08-15T08:04:04Z
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That's very believable that most of the ND's are Cops. Also the reason that most ranges don't allow holster practice. Ranges are very expensive but a publicly funded one doesn't need all the bells and whistles that a private one does. So I really can't see them claiming 5mil. The range here in Henrico (Colonial Shooting Academy) has 2 tactical ranges and one is dedicated to Law Enforcement. Then a couple others for the general public. For major police practice or drills it would probably be worth the drive for them. Not for regular practice though.
A little bit. A lot if it's outdoors. An indoor shooting range needs to have a lot of innovative features. Bullet catching systems, a really great ventilation system, target retrieval, and everything needs to stand up to repeated bullet impacts while making ricochets as unlikely as possible. Basically, the firing room needs to be made out of very tough concrete and designed in such a way that people aren't going to get hurt. I imagine this is not cheap.
What they could better spend less money on is redesigning their current outdoor firing range. Building higher bullet berms would probably solve the problem pretty definitely. Also, a wall of trees between the range and any houses would make it almost impossible for stray shots to hit houses. The rest would just be teaching proper range discipline.
It won't improve their skill, just a waste of money, bullets, and time. Proper training is what matters not a nice new range, the public range with proper guidance and training would do better than a place where they can just waste bullets. For the safety of everyone they probably shouldn't be police.