Idaho Falls

hour out into the desert to one of the estab- lished gun club ranges to shoot. Only a few minutes into my first visit I knew that this range was doomed. There was no real ventilation, and while the ceil- ing above the range was thankfully solid concrete, it was covered in phone and electrical wires. Instructors told stories of how ricocheting bullets hit wires, knocking out phones and intercoms throughout the school. Not only was the downrange floor full of spent lead, but a blue haze hung on the air. The next day I wrote a memo to my supervisor saying that as far as I knew the Idaho Falls High School shooting ranged failed to comply with any air quality stan- dards for the Environmental Policy Agency (EPA) or access standards required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The cost to bring the facility into compliance would cost hundreds of thousands of dol- lars! Even though there was a need, this range was too much of a liability to try and maintain. Because the range was operated by IDFG but owned by School District 91, my letter was pretty much CYA (cover your anterior). The one thing I could do was to direct our volunteer instructors to not use the range because of safety reasons. The order was not popular because of the inconvenience it created, but the changing of our real- ity from things like 9/11 and Columbine was changing the way people looked at things and the idea of a shooting range in a school became as unheard of as bringing a gun to show and tell (Full Disclosure – In 1965, I brought a nonworking derringer to show and tell in a kindergarten outside of Chicago and it was no big deal to anyone, except the other kids who thought it was really neat.) Soon the former range space became the repository for all sorts of school detritus and its former life forgotten by nearly everyone. The irony is that even back then, as today, Idaho Code allows firearms in schools for use of a hunter education program. A fur- ther irony is that IDFG no longer requires its hunter education students anywhere in the state to complete a live fire section as part of hunter education. Unfortunately, in the end, fear by all parties involved resulted in a lost opportunity to train young people in safe gun handling. In those days, the big concern about indoor ranges was not so much their location, it was about the impact of lead on range users and staff. PHOTO COURTESY IDAHO FALLS HIGH SCHOOL 34 IDAHO FALLS MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2018 IF

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