Home shooting range

[DTM Builder]

So my BIL bought some property in north Hall Co. almost in White County. It has a perfect holler similar to Hickock45’s range. I checked the zoning and it’s AR IV, so that’s not a problem. The problem is he is a convicted felon, pot charge (non violent but stupid). So obviously he’s not allowed to own or posses firearms. I’m thinking that if I where to set up some targets that I would probably have to wait till he’s not home to shoot, and make sure we’re packed up and gone before he could come home. He’s cool with setting up a range and he could shoot air rifle on it legally I believe.

What does the ODT braintrust think? I sure don’t want to cause him any trouble.

 

[hamburglar3]

get a new wife

 

[palmettomoon]

LOL. I don't think it's a problem as long as he's not handling, in control of or in possession of the firearms on his property. In other words, when you get there to shoot you'll need to shout, "Cletus! Git in the truck!" in case any lawdogs show up.

Have you asked him if he'd tried to petition a court to have his firearms ownership rights restored? What was caught with, a tractor trailer load of jazz cabbage?

 

[Hayata]

What a great time to get into black powder!

 

[GAgunLAWbooklet]

Georgia felons can't have a black powder muzzle stuffer-either.

Federal gun laws have a narrower definition of a firearm which excludes antique firearms or replicas of antiques. That doesn't apply to Georgia's own state-level laws against felons with firearms .
In this state, anything that throws a projectile from the burning of a combustible material behind the projectile counts as a firearm.

 

[GAgunLAWbooklet]

if your brother-in-law is a convicted felon, the cops will probably come out and try to talk to you and him if you do some shooting on his property. Even if he doesn't touch a gun or ammo. It's perfectly legal for him to let you shoot on his property it's just that he can't do it but I think many officers would consider that would have reasonable suspicion to investigate any shooting coming from the property owned by a convicted felon who can't have firearms .

 

[GAgunLAWbooklet]

You mentioned Hickok 45's shooting range. He has 40 acres of rolling hills in Tennessee to do his shooting, and even where he doesn't seem to have any real backstop (if he misses one of his metal plate targets), I don't know if there's anything else for miles in the direction that he shooting.

It may be the case that "even if" if his bullets go off his property, all the adjoining property owners in that direction might just have vacant woods and farm fields.

Make sure to consider where your bullets are going to end up. From what I've seen, most people who have a backyard shooting range do not have any real backstop and they know that the bullets are going to go ricocheting off into the woods.They assume that the slugs will get stopped quickly by hitting tree branches and tree trunks.
I would not make that assumption and rely on it with other peoples lives and homes in the danger zone. I would make sure that you fire into an embankment with a very steep slope, which is free of rocks that might deflect a bullet.

Or you can stack big piles of dirt, mulch, whole tree trunks (not random tree limbs and other wind fall, with all that space in between the branches). I'm talking logs that have had all their side limbs trimmed off of them and fit together tightly.

I once made a shooting backstop for 100 yard rifle zero checking . It was on 5 acres of property, and I had piled up a ton of shovel dug (manually dug) red clay piled in one place. It was a pile / mound that was about 4 feet tall and 6 feet wide.

My target was located just a couple feet off the ground in front of that big pile, but wouldn't you know that I had several ricochets off of that pile, possibly do to small rocks, no bigger than golf balls, embedded in that dirt.

One evening just before sunset, after we've been shooting 30 minutes, a neighbor actually drove over to tell us that he heard the ricocheting bullets flying right over his house and slapping the tree limbs above his home.

LESSON: Use very steep walls for any embankment or hill that you expect to catch your bullets. Not a 30° to 45° slope, but a slope that's much closer to vertical or near 90°. And rake through it and get out any rocks or big stones that you find.

My backyard range now has a very steep wall of red Georgia clay facing the shooter, and I place the target(s) on a wooden frame directly in front of that backstop wall. There is no way a bullet could go through the target in the wood without also going straight into the red dirt a couple feet behind it.

But, a novice shooter, or somebody that stupidly tries to do a mag dump of "spray and pray" might put rounds above that hand-dug backstop. If a bullet were to go above that backstop, it might ricochet off the natural pine needle covered ground, which only has a slope of probably 15°. Good thing that missing the backstop is very rare, and aerial surveillance and satellite photographs of other properties in that direction tell me that it is almost all undeveloped with only a few homes and farm buildings located within a mile in that direction.

 

[GAgunLAWbooklet]

Pic of my private "shooting range backstop," located on some rural hunting and camping property.

The embankment that I created by digging into a hillside with picks and shovels is about 8 feet wide and 5 feet tall.
The dirt that I removed from the area where the targets now stand was thrown above the backstop to create an extra layer of soft and recently shoveled dirt on the ground there, to minimize the chance of ricochet if a bullet did hit the gently sloping ground rather than the perpendicular mud cliff.

 

[gh1950]

Back to the OP - I wouldn't do it.

Just because it's legal (barely) doesn't make it smart.

Wilson Shoals Shooting Range, newly renovated, can't be too far away.

 

[ShooterG]

Do you guys ask everyone at Walmart if they are a felon before walking around with your gun?