Spare The Rod...And Gun Club The Shooting Range Should Stay Right Where It Is--Yuppies Be Damned. By Jeff Smith FIRST COME, FIRST served. History is full of examples of this traditional legal precept. And, sadly, of its violation. Say, for instance, a man notices his neighbors are honest and industrious but they don't get the respect they deserve because their work is sweaty, dirty and pays poorly. More affluent people look at their grimy hands and starving, flea-bitten hounds and sneer at them. This man decides his friends need affordable soap and dog food, so he buys land outside of town and down-wind and opens a rendering plant. But over the years people move in around the man's rendering plant--knowing full-well what goes into the plant and what comes out of it, including the smell--and after a time they complain to the government about the man and his plant and the odors that emanate from the place. Whose fault is it their noses are offended? Their own. And the man who went there first, when the place was remote and his industry was inoffensive, has legal standing. People bitching about the Tucson Tallow Co. might consider this parable. As might the folks on the northeast side of Tucson who are currently belly-aching about the Tucson Rod and Gun Club and its 17-acre shooting range, located in the general area of the entrance to Sabino Canyon. The club has been there, operating a safe range, and one of only a handful of outdoor shooting facilities in the Tucson area, since 1952. Probably half or more of the people currently expressing their outrage over the existence of the range were not yet born when the place first obtained its use permit from the U.S. Forest Service. But today a mixed group of neighbors of the shooting range, and Sabino Canyon visitors--hikers, bikers and tram-riders--are kvetching at the Forest Service, trying to get the superintendent to yank Tucson Rod and Gun Club's use permit and force the range to close and the club to move. A year and a half ago the district ranger in charge of the area where the range is located recommended it be closed. But that ranger's boss decided several months later the issue was not so black and white, and said he was reconsidering the issue and intended to take as long as the case merited to decide whether to suspend the use permit--for which the club pays $6,500 annually--or simply allow the range to continue operating as it has for nearly half a century. How it has operated these 44 years is easy to assess: Safely, successfully, inoffensively. The Tucson Rod and Gun Club has not gone hunting trouble; trouble has come and knocked at its door. Nobody is getting shot and killed trying to hike Sabino Canyon. No neighbors are being kept from sleeping or holding normal conversation by noise from the shooting range. Nobody, contrary to reports and editorials published in The Arizona Daily Star, is shooting howitzers at the range. Indeed, it would seem much of the highly critical assessment of the range and of the club that has operated it, lo these many decades, was pulled either out of thin air or out of the editorial writer's ass. Under the headline "Expel gun club from Sabino" the Star thundered: "The gun club, for starters, should recall three facts: The vast majority of Tucsonans believe it (the range) belongs elsewhere; blah, blah, blah." I asked TR&G president Mark Harris what poll or public vote the Star alluded to in this "fact" about the vast majority's belief and he had not heard of any. Me neither. So I called the Star and asked. There was no such expression of public opinion, the writer conceded, he was "just more or less pretending to speak for the broader public." Oh. I used to write editorials for the Star, and the deal was I could more or less pretend to speak for myself, when I wrote an essay under my own byline, or I could more or less pretend to speak for the publisher and the great corporate conscience of the newspaper when I wrote anonymous editorials, but I never got to speak, less or more, pretend or for real, for the broader public. I guess things have changed at the Star. For one thing, the whims and winds of politically correct fashion have turned a once rowdy and robust civil libertarian into a hand-wringing, tofu-eating, maiden-aunt. The Star's version of the Bill of Rights has been reduced to nine or less, and any combustion that issues a report greater than a mouse fart--including but not limited to firearms, motorcycles, hot-rods and flatulent cattle--is excoriated in print. But some things have not changed, including but not limited to common law, common sense and fair-play. If anything the shooting range is comparatively quieter, now that there's a constant background din of traffic, TV sets, and meditating yuppies chanting mantras. Not to mention the intolerable crunching noise of Vibram soles over rocks and dirt. Leave the range be, and go save a whale.

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