You Know You’re a Gun Nut …

when you start thinking about places you could put shooting ranges, and thinking about it in this level of detail:

As you can see there is lots of empty space in this underground garage. And with the aid of my trusty laser range finder I found places where it was 345 yards from wall to wall. It’s not really practice for Boomershoot (minimum range is 375 yards) but it’s close. And it’s would be better than anything else within 20 miles or so.

I was discussing this with some Microsoft friends at lunch the other day and they had a concern about the ceiling height. As the range gets longer the midrange height of the bullet gets larger too. Would people start hitting the ceiling beams? In particular Jim was concerned about using a 45-70 which has a trajectory resembling artillery.

It’s a valid concern. With a 340 yard zero a typical .45-70 cartridge is going to have a midrange height of over 50 inches. My AR-15 shooting it’s favorite ammo is going to have only a 7.1 inch midrange height. And my .300 Win Mag would have only have a midrange height of 6.3 inches.

Go over and see Joe’s dream indoor range.  It certainly looks the part.  We have significant unoccupied space in our building too, and I’ve thought it would make a great air gun range, or even a smallbore range if you could get the right backstop.  We have a good 45 yards inside in the unoccupied part.  Joe is more of a long range shooter than I am, and his preferred targets a bit more, shall we say, reactive.  Thus his dreams are bigger too :)

5 thoughts on “You Know You’re a Gun Nut …”

  1. I was passing through downtown Greenville, Texas and thinking “that abandoned car shop would make a fine indoor range”…wish we had an indoor range somewhere in Denton, Tex (my hometown) too.

  2. N.U.G.U.N., Yeah. I thought of that. But I wanted to conclude with a “reason” not to do it just so someone wouldn’t accuse me of planning to do it. Plus, you know someone would bring in their own bench and lob a few 400 grain blobs of lead into a beam and ruin it for everyone.

    But I do think it would be absolutely awesome to have a 300+ yard range with no wind in which to do load testing.

  3. I’ve run into some empty supermarket and MediaPlay spots that I think… there’s a range, a nice store, and a lunch counter all in one spot. Get your quickie lunchtime bang.

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