re: #284 Lidane

I normally despise CNN, but there was an article over there about this story and one of the firearms guys they quoted made a good point:

There’s a lot of truth to that. The range where this happened is designed for gun tourism, letting inexperienced people fire all these high grade weapons if they just pay enough cash. If your instructors are ammosexuals instead of highly trained professionals who make gun safety their highest priority, then it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

“Gun tourism” is a very good, and very alarming term. The parents are probably pretty uninformed themselves or they wouldn’t let their children anywhere near these places. They probably assume this kind of business is a great deal more regulated than it really is, that the operators must have all kinds of certificates and licenses and approvals to even own machine guns let alone rent them to people. In fact, the class 3 license for a machine gun does not have a proficiency requirement and there is not a whole lot of regulation otherwise. There is no sanctioning body other than various voluntary associations, including the NRA. Anyone can set up a firing range if they can get past whatever local and zoning requirements might exist. Most of these deal with the size, location, and safety factors of the facility and have little or nothing to say about the competence of the owners.