Tuesday, November 18, 2008

AZ: Tonights Table Mesa BLM Meeting

I attended the Table Mesa BLM Planning meeting this evening that I had posted about earlier. The BLM representative said that the turnout was much larger than expected. No exact count of attendees was given but the estimate was somewhere around 200 people. Gun owners were the largest group there so we were well represented. The second largest group identified themselves as rock crawlers. Several members of the rock crawlers group made some wild unsubstantiated claims.

One example was one rock crawler who stated "99% of the shooters don't clean up after themselves." I think it is easily agreed that 99% would be way too high of a number. My initial thought was that 99.643% of all made up statistics are 100% incorrect. I would tend to think it would likely be in the single digits but I am not aware of any studies that provide an actual number. I don't know what the exact percentage of irresponsible users would be who don't pack out their garbage, but I would agree that whatever the percentage of folks from all aspects of recreational public land use that don't clean up after themselves is, they do manage to do a large disservice to everyone. As an Eagle Scout I have always ascribed to the practice of pack it in, pack it out, and leave the area cleaner than you found it.

Some of the ideas proposed by our opponents included making certain areas off limits to shooters or even so far as to have one or two designated areas for shooting while making all other locations off limits. One gun owner at the meeting raised an excellent question. He asked how many people had been injured by irresponsible shooters in the past. The BLM representative had no idea. He then posited that perhaps they were trying to create a solution to a problem that doesn't even exist. I couldn't agree more.

They are accepting public comments until December 20th. Drop them an e-mail at AZ_PDO_Routes@BLM.gov & let them know that you are against restricting BLM public land use by hunters & shooters.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Shawn again. Couldn't make it to that one. I'm going to try and go to the one tomorrow on Thursday. Might call in sick at work.

On another, lighter note and a question, someone wanted to buy my Yugo sks tomorrow as well (I just got a Tula Russian, don't need 2) but it has a headspacing issue and I haven't told him. So what should I sell it at? If at all?

Dustin said...

Hi Shawn, glad to hear you might make it to the next meeting. As for the Yugo SKS - you might consider keeping it for now - the longer you keep it the more valuable it is bound to become, especially if Obama manages to get his gun ban passed. Even if we manage to stop his gun ban, they'll still be at least as valuable as they are now, probably more so due to inflation with all the bail out money the Fed is currently printing. If you do sell I'd inform the buyer of the head spacing issue first. To look up the current values you might try gunbroker.com

Anonymous said...

No need for limiting the areas. Shooters or not, we should all be responsible for cleaning up after ourselves. Taking care of our environment is a must. Whatever is good for nature we should do.


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