[penguicon-general] Geeks with Guns

[Garrett Kajmowicz]

On Wednesday 21 February 2007 14:29, Clay Dowling wrote:
> I was hoping for a little more clarification on the Geeks with Guns event.
>  I signed up for it on the assumption that it will be a group of
> conference attendees going to the range and enjoying an afternoon with
> firearms.
>
> The notice that we shouldn't bring our own ammunition, but must instead
> purchase it on site, confused me a little bit.  It may be that I'm just
> not familiar with the practices of private ranges, but gun owners can be
> very selective about the ammunition they use and this requirement struck
> me as odd.
>
> Could some more information be provided on this?  Am I completely off
> base, and this is some sort of paintball event?  Some information on the
> facility where we'll be shooting is desirable as well.


Hi!  I'm the person running Geeks with Guns.  To answer your question, this is 
in fact a real firearms event, not a paintball event.  We will be going to an 
indoor pistol shooting range for 2 hours (4 hours scheduled in total to 
account for transportation, people getting lost, etc.  I refuse to run late 
or over my alotted time).

The range we are going to is operated by Range Masters Inc. 
(http://www.firinglineguns.com/).  They changed their name, so they are hard 
to find unless you look under the new (or old?) name.  I digress.

As an aside, there are two major issues that affect indoor ranges from an 
ammunition perspective.  The first is lead contamination.   Unjacketed 
ammunition can result in substantially increased lead contamination.  Ranges 
have indoor air filtration, but because it is a heavy metal contaminant, the 
people who change the filters need to wear disposable protective gear rated 
for lead dust.  This costs a lost of money and down time for the range.  Thus 
they try to minimize contamination by eliminating certain types of 
ammunition.

Next, ranges run into insurance problems/costs.  There is a higher risk of 
injury to people who use handloaded ammunition over factory ammunition.  
Over-pressure ammunition may cause damage to the firearm (and user).  
Underpressure ammunition may cause a squib fire.  Even worse, a hangfire may 
result from incorrectly made ammmunition.  The indoor range I shoot at in 
Pittsburgh will not allow any outside ammunition on to the range because of 
this reason alone.

Under their old policies (that I cannot find online any more), the range we 
are going to would allow people to bring their own ammunition, providing that 
it was inspected and approved by store/range officials.  However, since we 
are looking to have ~20 people at this event, having 20+ individual lots of 
ammunition approved would be unreasonable.  The simple way to address this is 
to prohibit outside ammunition coming in.  It makes the store like us more 
(for the ammo sales), and keeps the headaches down for everybody.

I hope that this answers your questions to your satisfaction.



-     Garrett