There are plenty of places around the country that are range deserts; major metropolitan areas with limited or no access for lawful gun owners to have a safe place to train, compete, or shoot recreationally. Looking for a range inside the Chicago or Washington, D.C. city limits, for instance? You’re out of luck. Even in New York City there are just a couple of ranges that are accessible to members or the general public, and they’re alll privately operated.
If range deserts exist, there are also range oases; locales with plenty of formally designated places to shoot. One such location can be found in the red clay soil of southern Oklahoma; specifically Atoka County, where one new public range recently had its grand opening.
Located at the Wildlife Management Area, the county welcomed their completely accessible public range Thursday at the grand opening event.
“It’s going to have an archery range, it’s going to have a pistol range and it’s going to have a rifle range and a shotgun range,” said Atoka County Wildlife Biologist. “It’s got a little bit of everything for everybody.”
The range has been in the works for around a decade, when the county first began funding the shooting range program. This is the first of many, with several more gun ranges expected in the coming years.
Atoka County has a goal to provide the community with more resources.
“That’s what we want,” said Shooting Range Coordinator Amanda Thomas. “[To give] the shooters and constituents to a place to come shoot.”
If Atoka County, with a population of about 14,000, can find the funding for multiple public ranges, then I’m sure that New York City, Chicago, D.C., and other range deserts could do the same. And arguably, the need for publicly accessible ranges is far more acute in those big cities than in a rural place like Atoka County, where I’m guessing many gun owners already have spots on their property where they can safely send rounds downrange.
After Donald Trump is inaugurated on Monday, I’m hoping to see the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention revamped and retooled into something like the “Office of Responsible Gun Ownership”. The hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants that Joe Biden’s been pumping to gun control groups and anti-gun activists should come to an immediate halt, and those funds should be redirected towards programs that work to provide education and training for gun owners, including funding to build out publicly accessible ranges in 2A-hostile territory. There may still be room for grants to proven and effective violence prevention programs that don’t rely on new gun control laws or anti-gun attitudes, but the main focus should be on protecting and promoting our Second Amendment rights, particularly in those parts of the country where gun ownership has been made culturally taboo, politically incorrect, and a legally dubious proposition.
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