AZKJ wrote:
I give up!!! No wonder the "Greenies" are winning in their efforts to close public lands.
Okay... the Four Peaks Clean-up was on Saturday, it rained Sunday and part of Monday. Today is Tuesday... just three days after the clean-up.
I was off work today, so i jumped in the Jeep to take a ride out to Four Peaks to see if i could get some snow pictures. While there I decided to take a ride over to Area F where several of us from LOST helped a few other folks clean up the place.
The place has already been trashed as well as several other clean-up spots!!! It's disgusting to see the hard work of all the people involved go down the tubes so fast!!! IMHO, the entire area needs to be closed off to shooters, they have little or no regard for the land. On second thought, it ought to be illegal to shoot anywhere but on an official target range. And we're lucky if they don't close us out too!!
As some of you may know, I posted the clean-up on a gun forum I frequent occasionally and caught all kind of insults.
Cleaning up after those idiots is not the answer. Unless we can somehow get the message across to the shooting community... we'll just be out there year after year after year.
Off my soap box.
Area F on Saturday, after the clean-up....
You can imagine how this makes me feel. Thanks for sending me the PM.
As a bit of a tradition. After everyone has left I like to drive the cleanup sites to take a look at them. This year almost every site had someone at it shooting already just an hour after we were there! No biggie, its legal and I'm a shooter too. The biggie was that one site had a guy with a few boxes of old food and some pallets already set up shooting. (it looked like heck)
The other site had some kids at it shooting and I asked them to cleanup after themselves. Which I know was met with a yah right old man after I left.
Its all part of the process. I just hope that each time we do it, a few people learn to treat the land with more respect. I know not everyone will stop.
One thing I want to say is that, I think its bad to say that shooting should be illegal everywhere, but at a range. For example, I'm near Anza Borrego right now and today we saw several shooters spots filled with shot up trash. The thing is, ITS ILLEGAL TO SHOOT ANYWHERE in the park we were in. That didn't stop them. If you making shooting illegal it will only stop the responsible ones. The Yahoos don't care about laws or they'd not litter in the first place.
In fact, last years Four Peaks Pickup grand prize was donated by a good shooter organization and both years had lots of shooters there participating.
Just like everything, there are the responsible shooters and there are the $*^*# idiots. There are responsible Jeepers, 4x4ers, dirt bikers, atvers etc, but there are some horrible ones. Shutting an area down to everything is one way to handle it, but I'd rather try everything else we can first.
I feel your pain though AZKJ. I'm having a hard time not getting really, really.... ANGRY about that happening SO fast....
