Rifle Range Gets the Boot From Mont. Park

[deadparrot]

HELENA, Mont. - Erosion by wind and water is a big part of the story at Makoshika State Park, a place of badlands and dinosaur fossils, bobcats and bluebirds. Now some people who enjoy firing guns at a range there fear erosion of what they have come to view as an entitlement.

The state parks agency plans to eliminate a decades-old rifle range at Makoshika, a rolling expanse of peculiar sandstone formations in eastern Montana. The 11,500-acre park gets about 54,000 visits a year, and is especially popular among gun enthusiasts in Glendive, about a quarter-mile from the rifle range and its plywood targets.

"Things have changed," said Tom Reilly, an assistant administrator in the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. "Now we have a visitor center on one side and a public campground on the other."

Shooting may disturb people who "come from New Jersey to camp and wake up to gunfire," he said "We may be used to that, living here, but others may not be."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060318/ap_on_re_us/park_rifle_range

[Retired AF Dem]

1. The rifle range was there first

Why couldn't the visitor center and campground be built somewhere else? And why should people from Montana be worried about visitors from NJ?