I Understand There Are Some Good Deals Near the Airforce Base...

The range I'm an officer of recently received a complaint letter from a nearby resident. Bear in mind that the Tucson Rifle Club , established in 1896, has been at its present location since 1965. Here's the letter, edited to remove the name and other identifying information, but spelling and grammatical errors are verbatim:

This isn't a safety issue, but it is a Bill of Rights Issue concerning my "persute of life, liberty, and happiness". Every morning the first thing I do is, go outside in my yard to pray. My church is my yard, but I've become tired, over the years, of my prayers having the sound of gunfire accompanying me. Somehow, praying for peace while listening to gunshots just isn't compatible, and for 10 yrs. I've listened 7 days a week, 363 days a year, from 7:00am to 5pm, and I very tired of having peace and quiet only 2 days a year. My husband is also fed up with having to fall asleep with a pillow over his head to block out the gunfire every morning when he gets home from work.

How I'd like to resolve this annoyance is to close the club 2 days a week, one of them being Sunday, and to shorten the number of hours you're open from 10 hours a day to 7 hours a day by opening 3 hours later each day. Also, there might be funding available for construction of sound reduction barriers that you could apply for. Another possibility might be to include representation from (the nearby neighborhood) on the board of directors.

We're neighbors, and all good neighbors talk problems out in a friendly environment comming to a resolution of the problem that leaves everyone happy. That's how we do things in out neighborhood. Won't you be good neighbors?

Um, no.

You moved to your neighborhood ten years ago. The range was already there, and you knew about it. The range has a membership of about a thousand families, and we're "persuing" our rights to life, liberty, happiness and arms. Many of us can only get to the range on weekends, so closing on Sundays is right out. Most of us want to do our shooting as early as possible, which under Game and Fish regulation is 7:00 AM. That's before the wind kicks up and before it starts getting really hot in the summer, so no, we won't be restricting hours either.

And for many of us, the range is our church.

Want a neighborhood occupant on the board? Join the club, meet the minimum requirements, and get elected.

Every one of your suggestions requires us to acquiesce to your desires, while requiring nothing of you that you haven't already yielded for ten years. That's not compromise, that's dictation of terms. Hardly a "resolution that leaves everyone happy."

Here's an idea: MOVE. You can find a place that's quieter, and you can leave us the hell alone! That would make everybody happy! Pima County recently greatly expanded the Davis-Monthan Airforce Base noise impact zone. Perhaps you could find a nice little house there and then tell the U.S. Government that you'd like them to curtail their operating hours?