The closure of our local range has gone on far too long. I know hundreds of locals who had volunteered and invested the majority of their free time for over the last 30 to 40 years to create one of the safest and best public shooting ranges on the West Coast. This public range has been stolen from our community by the state of California, and it is a festering and expanding problem.
The state has broken the hearts and spirits thousands of citizens in SLO County, who have used this area to prepare for hunting season, to recreate with firearms in a safe controlled environment. The closure is clearly a petty political move for reasons unknown to me and is a topic that dominates the majority of discussion among the rural community.
This range closure is building significant division and distrust of the state among our community. A correlation would be closing all the good surfing beaches in the county and expecting the surfing community to just accept it for years. I both surf and hunt and there are just as many hunters in SLO County as there are surfers. The hunters are just are not as vocal in the political atmosphere these days. Our county is very expensive to survive and raise a family in, and we are all choosing to live here because of the natural resources and facilities available to us. The SLO Gun Range operated by SLOSA was a big part of our community.
The land was given to the state by the military to be used as a public shooting range, available to all. Everyone who has lived here since the origin of the land transfer knows the purpose of this land. Any current environmental argument in relations to a seasonal creek on the property is a means to keep the range closed. All of the shooting ranges were purposefully built to protect this waterway, and it flows freely every winter. Any future creek protections desired could easy be fortified in the matter of days to accommodate a reopening of the ranges.
Hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours and millions of dollars of local fundraisers events have occurred over my 37-year lifetime to build out these ranges. In fact, my parents’ next door neighbor was the original safety officer who developed the first range and hosted hundreds of free firearms safety and hunting classes over his lifetime. This closure has affected him and many of his friends.
Closing this shooting range will not stop people from using their firearms and recreating; they will just be pushed out to less safe and effective ways of using them. Because there is no local gun range, there is now significantly more shooting in the surrounding Los Padres Forest. There are also many people hunting this year, without properly sighted in guns or without the practice they need to safely operate them. I know this because I am out in the Los Padres almost weekly and grew up on a property bordering public land, unlike the people making the decision to keep this range closed. Families camping in SLO County can now expect to hear more high powered rifles and shotgun blasts outside of hunting season.
We need representation on this matter, and the range needs to be reopened ASAP, preferably operated by the San Luis Obispo Sportsman’s Association. The $400,000 “audit deficit” is an offensively low cost to justify an extended closure to thousands of people who used the shooting range every year. Clearly a cost that is a drop in the bucket in comparison to the billions of dollars in misused public funds we see every year by this state. Δ
Brian Budd writes to New Times from Atascadero. Send a response for publication to letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Aug 14-24, 2025.
David Hacker, Bob Spafford, CDFW employees and their director Chuck Bonham have been dragging their feet with a plethora of excuses for reopening the range on Hwy 1.
Thank you CDFW!
We are the government, and we are here to help.
The range closure was a tremendous loss to the community as well as to a large number of people who visited our community. SLOSA did a great job, there were never any safety issues. There is no reason it shouldn’t be reopened as soon as possible.
The director and everyone down to Hacker should be terminated for abuse of power and loss of revenue for the entire county of San Luis Obispo and putting the safety of all CCW holders at risk by taking away a place to practice and qualify. Not to mention the harm to our local Law enforcement who used the range to train at. Typical delusional disingenuous condescending vindictive jerks from Sacramento letting their egos exceeding their intelligence.