Range Day
February 13, 2003
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Posted by Aubrey Turner
Off to the range to cull the herd of paper targets. It’s a welcome relief after the way this week has gone.
It’s too bad every day can’t be range day (which is why one of my long-term goals is to have my own land with enough space for my own private range).
Categories: Guns
That’s been one of my goals, too. One of my friends up here has his own range, and I love it. We go out there and play for hours on end. I would never be able to hold down a job to support my shooting habit if I had one in my backyard like that.
I briefly considered buying a house and land at the same time, but several factors finally convinced me to wait. I could theoretically do my job from anywhere, but I’m dependent on high-speed internet access if I’m not in the office. In order to meet my goal of having my own range, I would have to have a pretty good sized piece of land and I would need to be far enough out in the country that I wouldn’t be likely to be annexed into a nearby town anytime soon (those pesky towns have the nasty habit of outlawing shooting in the city limits 🙁 ). Additionally, in order to afford that much land, I’d have to go pretty far from work as well. And high-speed internet access is currently pretty dicey out in the country. The only option right now is DirectDuo (two-way satellite), but I’ve heard a lot of bad things about it (high latency, draconian usage policy, no warning bandwidth throttling, etc).
Until something better comes along, I’ll just have to muddle along in suburbia and plan to have my own land when I retire.
Aubrey, forgive the DOH! but I just realized that you live in the same area we do.
Kim and I are members of the DFW Gun Store. Which range do you frequent?
We, too, long for land where we can shoot on a daily basis. We’re planning to build a place with a patio where we can shoot from. I look forward to it so when I have a sucky shooting day, I can just go back inside and try again later. There is little else more discouraging than a bad day at the range and the desire to remedy it “tomorrow” if only the schedule permitted the daily trek to the range.
We’re hoping that the high speed Internet capabilities catch up about the time we’re ready to move and buy the land.
I generally go to the range at Bass Pro in Grapevine. If I decide to go on a weekend, then I will occasionally go to the Quail Creek range (it’s located at the intersection of 1171 and I-35W). But most of my weekends are spent doing other things (catching up on stuff I couldn’t do during the week).
I haven’t tried DFW Gun Range yet.
On the topic of high-speed internet, I’ve been watching the nascent powerline network technology with great interest. If they can work out the bugs such that a powerline can be used for network connections, that would mean that almost everyone could have high-speed internet access. They have some interesting physics challenges to overcome, so we’ll just have to wait and see.