I belong to a private club to avoid that mess but it is an hr from home, so I still frequent a local national forrest range which is 10mi from home. On a nice Sat or Sun it can be a Zoo. One day I was shooting groups with a pristine antique Anschutz 54 Super Match at 50y. In the bay next to me was a nimrod with a short bbl AK47 pistol? Designed to avoid NFA SBR licensing rules. The muzzle blast from that rig was shaking my sight picture. The AK-fool was ripping off one mag dump after the next and then I noticed that the dumkopf was now shooting my tgt. After confronting him and asking him to try to shoot his own tgt he admitted that he did not bring one. I gave him some cardboard and a bulls eye to aim at but I don't think he ever actually hit it. A few min later, he was raining brass down on me and one hit the wooden stock on my rifle dinging it. That was enough. I had to get up and go home. The alternative would likely have earned either jail time or a medal. My fault for being there on a weekend. I have learned that week days are best. If it must be a weekend go very early. The IQ of the shooters goes down as the day wears on. If not early then go very late or when it is raining or snowing or cold as hell. My local public range is not a bad one. Range discipline is usually good and we have not had any recent safety issues but it is a new bunch each time and you must be alert all the time. Not just for idiots but also for criminals who would kill you and steal your guns. A perceived risk if not necessarily real. When I go there I assume that there is at least one bad guy there and while I know some of the regulars, there are also strangers. Most are normal good folk. Occasionally, there are some who raise the hair on my neck.
One weekend I arrived to find two 20 something males dressed in full camo and tactical gear looking all the world like they stepped off the convoy from Mosul. Complete with a SAS style shemagh scarf, shades, combat knife, mag-vest, handgun in the vest holster, etc. They looked like they were about to go on a black op. Very "Cool". They were practicing shooting a IPSC style humanoid tgt with short AR15's tricked out with lasers, red-dot sights, etc. Their tgt might have been 10-15 ft downrange. They would rip of 2 or 3 rds as fast as possible and then do a reload and do 2-3 more. One seemed to be training the other and neither seemed to know what they were doing. Not unsafe per se but just enough off to make me uneasy. Their mannerisms and body language screamed "Gay" but I am not a good judge of this, so I could be wrong.
Their rifles kept jamming and they would clear them and just leave the live rds laying on the ground. They wanted to "train" about 5 ft forward of the firing line and when asked to move back to the firing line by one of the other shooters for safety sake they argued that they could not do what they needed to do from that location. I think somebody remarked that they would have a hard time doing what they needed to do with a hole in their a$$ also. They left for a while at this point, lol. I think I picked up about 25 live .223 rds from the ground along with about 200 empty brass during one of the breaks. When they returned I went home. That was one of the more extreme examples. I never did see them shoot at a tgt further then a few feet away.
