Yeah, it has gotten pretty bad on some spots so I understand and appreciate the governments' action on this, as hard as it makes things for responsible enthusiasts of the shooting sports. About 8 years ago a friend told me about the South end of Stave Lake when I asked about where to go to shoot airguns with my kid and my brother and his kids. So we drove up there, and after about 3 turns on the winding dirt road saw a guy with a long gun on a tripod on his pickup truck taking a shot well over 1km across the valley. He was teaching his wife to shoot long range. We were reassured after chatting for a minute, he seemed sensible enough, so we found a place not too far away to shoot into a dirt hillside which had recently been clearcut. Good big backstop, lots of shotgun shells on the ground (my son was 5 and loved collecting them), so we put out some paper and tin can targets and went to town.
A short while later, after we'd maybe had 10 shots each from various vintage low-powered airguns, we were startled by a full-auto burst from maybe 100 yards away up the hill. Looking up there we saw what looked like an Uzi. The guy who had just mag-dumped about 30 rounds handed it off to someone else, magazines got swapped, and the burst of fire repeated. We were considering packing up, getting the kids together, glancing nervously up the hill... then those guys beat us to it and packed their things and drove off. We ended up spending a couple of hours up there, thoroughly enjoyed the outing, but that little machine gun interlude was spooky. They were shooting in the same direction we were, at big dirt backdrops on the side of the mountain, but still...
It wasn't much later that I read an account of some idiot having put a few rounds of .50BMG through some family cabin. While the family were in side. They had to get low and hustle out to the car and drive for town and report it. The dad apparently said it wasn't the first time bullets had whizzed low overhead, but it was the first time his home had been hit. He was more than 2km up the lakeside. No idea where the shooter was, but they plainly had no concern for their backstop. That kind of thing just ruins it for everyone. Just lucky nobody was killed.
