Newspaper Article 1

A local non profit organization calling themselves the Michigan Coalition for Return to Constitutional Government (MCRCG), has taken on the state and the DNR by launching a petition drive to reinstate a shooting range in the Lost Nation game management area.
   "We want the state and the DNR to reinstall the shooting benches they removed and reopen that range," said spokesperson Edwin Dane, also vice president and co-founder of MCRCG. "It has been there for over 50 years without any safety problems. Why does the state now feel it is unsafe?"
    The closing of this range has no factual base and is unwarranted, he said. According to Dane, many sportsmen use this facility to practice shooting, sighting their shotguns and rifles for the hunting season here in Michigan which contributes millions of dollars to the state and the DNR's budget. "As a game management area, this land was purchased with the peoples' and sportsmen's' money and now the state and DNR want to close it to the people that made possible it's purchase,"
    Dane said. "We started this petition drive so that we might show those responsible for the management of :Lost Nation that it is the will of the people to have such a shooting range available to them here in Hillsdale county." he added. Dane said the group has been collecting signatures the last few weekends and anyone that would like to give a little of their time to help in the support of this effort can contact the following web site www.mcrcg.org "With only the first weekend under our belts we had collected nearly 1,000 signatures," he said. "That goes to show you how the people in this area feel about a place where they can go to enjoy their sport without having to travel a long distance or pay a large sum to belong to a club,"
    The group planes to take 2,000 signatures to Lansing today for the Natural Resources Commission (NRC) to review. Dane said he hopes that once people find out the group is working to get the range reinstated, they will join in the fight by writing letters and making calls to their representatives to let them know about the group's effort to get the shooting range back. "That's our land, not the states," he said.
    Martin Burleson, of Pittsford, has been a long-time user of the Lost Nation shooting range. He said he has not been able to use the range in the last year since the benches were removed. He added he has no idea why the benches were removed other than what he had heard about the possibility of a hiking path being installed. "There are 16,000 acres there," he said "Why does it (path) have to go through there? I do know some have misused it (shooting range) to dump garbage, but they do that all over the countryside." "Sportsmen paid for it," he said. "Now someone wants to put in a path. It will be just as trashy as before."
     David Dominic, wildlife supervisor for the South-central Management Unit of the DNR said nothing has been finalized concerning the Lost Nation game management area. "We looked at the shooting range, which is shaped in a bowl," he said "Bullets skip and fly out the back side resulting in a lot of bullet escaping the range. In order to address it, we can't just leave it, we had to do something." Dominic said that the fact there is a national walking trail nearby had nothing to do with taking out the benches "Other than there are bullets in the trees." "We have to consider the safety of the shooting range and the fact that people were not taking care of it," he added. Dominic said that through the Robinson Tax, different states get money, but that certain guidelines have to be followed to ensure "a safe and clean state game area." "All kinds of things were going on the last time we had an audit there," he said. "People were bringing in trash like TVs and shooting at them and then just leaving them. That's just not acceptable." In order to make the shooting range safe, Dominic said a flat range, parallel with the ground, is needed. The target area "should have a nice back stop and eyebrow so it will catch bullets. That costs hundreds of thousands of dollars," he said. In addition, a full-time person is needed to work the range, which is not affordable, but nevertheless, something that a shooting range "has to have."
     Dominic agrees that everyone that hunts knows that part of the money for that goes into maintenance in regulating and developing the habitat. "It's not like we haven't been providing that. We have shooting ranges such as the Sharonville Shooting range, one in McComb and one in Oakland. We're not going to be able to provide one in every county."