THE POWER OF THE PEN

My last assignment in the Army was an active duty tour in the Pentagon in the National Guard Bureau, Facilities Division.  I was the master planning coordinator for training areas belonging to the various states, but I also had other duties.  As soon as my boss found out I was a competitive shooter he assigned me to be a committee member of the “Indoor Range Committee”.

It seems that someone in the Environmental Branch of the Bureau read that shooting ranges were contaminated with lead.  Whatever he read compared shooting ranges to factories that manufactured lead products and indicated that the OSHA regulations should apply.  The Environmental Branch issued a recommendation that all the ranges be immediately shut down until the issue was resolved.  The Indoor Range Committee was tasked with determining what should be done to either close down or clean up all of the National Guard shooting ranges that are located in armories across the country, some 1000 plus ranges.

My position on this issue was that OSAH regulations did not apply because our soldiers (and various civilian groups using the ranges) did not spend eight hours a day in the ranges, just a couple of hours a week, and the soldiers even less.  When some states got the Environmental Branch’s “recommendation” they did shut down the ranges.  That’s when the civilian groups became upset and considered that as a “gun grabbing” move and an attack on their second amendment rights.

Many letters were written to congressmen and senators and they in turn queried the National Guard Bureau on the matter.  Letters were also written to the ,  as they have the ear of Congress on certain matters.  Needless to say, there was pressure on all sides.

The short version of this tale is that I briefed the congressional staffer, and ultimately a policy emerged for closing some ranges and up-grading or converting others.  Some states reopened their ranges to civilians, and the National Guard was funded for a program of remodeling and clean-up of indoor ranges.

The details of the “rest of the story” are interesting, but would take too much space to recount.  I’d be happy to write about it here sometime, but for now the point is this.  Letters to your congressmen do work. But they work best when they arrive in Washington in quantity, the more the merrier.  Letters from firearms associations and shooting groups carry weight, but a lot of letters from citizens carry more weight.