We support the Chabot Gun Club marksmanship range as a safe place to shoot. This is a valuable community resource in that it promotes firearms training and safe use among local citizens.
Why is this important?
This is a petition to counter another petition that wants to ban the Chabot range.
UPDATE: Since the original petition to close the range has been abandoned, it has been replaced by a petition to stop or limit the noise created by the gunfire. Here is a reasonable stance in support of the range:
-The Chabot range is arguably the finest and safest place to practice firearms use in the Bay Area.
-As the EBRPD is a public resource we have as much right to use the park as other users.
-If you take the park district's entire land area into consideration, this range, and the sound generated by it, occupies a small fraction of the park.
-To close the range would disproportionately discriminate against the rights of tens of thousands park users to satisfy the desires of, as it stands now, less than one thousand.
-Even to try to enclose it within a sound proof barrier would impose unreasonable costs...to be born by an as yet to be determined body of people.
-We call on the EBRPD to renew the Chabot Gun Club's lease to operate the range as a non-profit public service. And, ideally, write into the EBRPD by laws that this range lease never fail to be renewed for reasons of public protest, as long as the range is maintained as a safe and frequented public resource.