Readers and writers blog

I was reading Midwest Rock Lobster recently where the author, Rod McBride, was fantasizing about renting a .50-caliber machine gun and complaining that some “Volvo-driving NPR types” had forced the local firing range to move.

He’s writing from Kansas, of course, but his entry reminded me of a situation that played out a few years ago here at the edge of the New York City suburbs.

By the way, one of the reasons I read McBride’s weblog is not that he’s a libertarian but that he’s an intelligent, articulate libertarian who apparently loves to be provocative. And I like that.

And he does have both a sense of balance and a sense of humor: After stating his belief that the right to bear arms “extends all the way to nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers,” he swings the pendulum deftly back:

So the idea that owning a .50-caliber machine gun would be a criminal offense is as ridiculous as thinking you’d be wise to own one for personal protection.

No, I present no brief against McBride’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, but he did get me sympathizing with those Volvo-driving neighbors. The firing range he described — a place for “shooting junk cars” — sounded a bit ad hoc. And he said the neighbors were in a subdivision a mile and a half away.

As I recall from my Army days, an M-1 rifle can fire a .30-caliber bullet as far as two miles. A slug from a .50-caliber machine gun can travel four miles. Granted, the M-1 slug might be nearly spent by the time it got to the subdivision, but the .50-cal would make me think about moving.

Besides, some of the people I’ve seen with firearms — and I grew up with them in rural New Hampshire — remind me of celebrants on a hot day in Sadr City.

What happened here — well, the next town over where I rented a spot in a hilltop RV park after moving back to this area — was that I was driving home one day when I noticed cars parked along the road near a shale waterfall at the bottom of the hill. A bunch of guys were standing at the edge of the road, firing an assortment of guns into the waterfall.

At work the next day, I mentioned that I had seen people firing guns along a public road, but my coworkers weren’t surprised at all. Been that way for years, they said, adding that some of the shooters were probably local cops. It’s a way to “zero in” their weapons, it was explained to me.

Then I talked to the park owner. He had been fighting for years to get the shooting stopped. The hill wasn’t that high, and some guys couldn’t even hit the waterfall, he said. He had bullet holes to prove it.

I knew the police had their own firing ranges. And I wondered how those guys — especially the one with the shotgun — were “zeroing in” their weapons. In a waterfall.

Oh well, the shooting finally was stopped, but not because of the park owner or his bullet holes. No, it was somebody — a state environmental official, I think — who found the shale was so full of lead that it was leaching into the water. And the water subsequently ran into a large cornfield across the road.

McBride describes Kansas as “flyover country.” So are parts of New York, even near the city. (I hesitate to mention that one of the Sept. 11 airliners flew right over us on its way to the World Trade Center.) And farmers still have a voice here, too.

Now I don’t believe any neighbors ever got shot as a result of the waterfall fusillades, although I couldn’t swear to it. But I don’t think even that would have gotten the town fathers to tell the police to put a halt to the shooting.

But the idea of heavy metal in their sweet corn . . . case closed.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. The weapon shown at the top is an M-2 machine gun, a belt-fed .50-caliber gun that here is mounted on an armored vehicle but also can be operated from the ground on a tripod.

2. McBride continues the conversation in a followup entry. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but as I said in a comment beneath his post, I like the way the guy thinks.