As we told you in a previous newsletter, the board has recommended and the club has approved the creation of a pilot program to have a Safety Advisor at the range during peak use hours to help members and guests understand the rules, answer any questions they might have, and generally help everyone follow safe shooting practices. Again this person will just be acting in an advisory role, not as a range officer, and this is only a pilot program right now, but we hope it will be successful enough that the club will vote to make it permanent beginning next year. We currently have several volunteers, but we are looking for a few more, and our biggest priority is we need someone to act as the coordinator of the program. This person should have the computer and people skills to schedule duty shifts, and the vision to shape this program from the ground up. If you are interested in being this person, contact Wayne Rowett at 783-4470.

Another option for the Safety Advisor program is available. I (Dave Baalman) am willing to handle being the program coordinator, but I don’t have the time to do that and to do all the other things I am currently doing for the club. If someone or a couple someones would like to take over new member orientation and / or writing the newsletter every month, that would free me up to take on the Safety Advisor program. New member orientation is much simpler now that Griggs has installed a projector in the classroom, the program is all written, someone just needs to go through it with the new members every month. The newsletter isn’t that difficult either, you just need to attend the meetings and be the type of person who can use up about 2 pages talking about current events in the club. If someone can take over either program, I will of course be available to help out to get you going.

The club has once again put together a team to compete in the Northwest Regional postal league for NRA Highpower Sporting Rifle. Our first match is Saturday, June 15. Anyone else is welcome to attend and shoot, we will only send in the scores for the match team, but we can have as many shooters at the match as we want. Who knows, you might beat one of the team members and steal their spot on the team too! This match is fired from standing, sitting and prone positions, in slow and timed rapid fire, with 32 rounds for score plus sighters. It’s open to any centerfire rifle weighing 9.5 pounds or less. If you are interested, check the club website for a full description of the match. It’s a lot of fun, and the match goes very quickly, and the cost is only $3 per shooter to cover the cost of the targets.

We have received our NRA Foundation grant! We will be putting on an introduction to competitive shooting event, where anyone who has not competed in a particular discipline before can shoot a few rounds on the actual targets for that discipline, with actual firearms built for that discipline, firing ammo provided by the NRA Foundation. We will hold this event on Saturday, August 31, shooting to start at 9am, and it will be open to anyone who wishes to attend, they don’t have to be members of TCMSA. If you would like to attend the event or if you would like to help out in organizing it, contact Dave Baalman at 528-0813 or via email at dpbaalman@msn.com. We will need match shooters to act as coaches, and we will be needing several people to donate the use of their firearms (we have several pledged already, but could use more). If you are not a match shooter but would like to help out, we will be needing people to help with signing in participants and coordinating the event, so please don’t hesitate to offer your assistance.

There is a new bulletin board in the sign in shack (special thanks to Brett Menaker for donating it). There is a copy of the club schedule on there, as well as phone numbers for officers and other emergency contacts. We also have space for lost and found, and for sale or trade items. Feel free to post your for sale items on there, or lost and found, or special announcements, but please help us out by taking them down when they are out of date, sold, or have found their rightful owner.

We have a lot of new members, so you may see some unfamiliar faces at the range. If you do and you have the time, take a moment to introduce yourself. It’s good to keep everyone feeling like they are welcome, and it’s very helpful to new members to have some acquaintances that they can turn to for help with understanding the rules, or any other questions they might have about shooting in general.

On the opposite side of that same coin, please realize that when people are shooting, they are often working on load tests, or match practice, and don’t want to be disturbed. The time to talk to them is when they are between groups waiting for the barrel to cool, or when they are changing targets, loading magazines, etc. It’s also very helpful to those testing loads or going through a match practice drill to let them complete a group before going cold. If you can, try to coordinate with them on hot/cold timing (but if there is an emergency, don’t hesitate to call a CEASE FIRE in your loudest voice!)

See you at the range!

We are glad to see that the new steel targets on the range are getting a lot of use. Unfortunately there is already a hole in the 50 yard popper. The cost to replace the target will be around $100, so we will be leaving it in place until we know that we don’t have a problem. We would like to think that this was done by accident, so we will remind everyone to make sure at all times that you know what type of ammunition you are shooting. Steel core bullets can cause damage to the targets, and can cause sparks that can start a fire. Steel core bullets are common in imported ammo, as well as some domestic ammo such as Wolf. To test for steel core bullets, touch them to a magnet, if they stick, they are steel. There is a magnet on the range master’s stand near the flagpole.

Armor piercing ammo can go right through the steel targets. These are typically military surplus, and often have color coded bullet tips. NATO surplus ammo with black, red or white tips are usually armor piercing, or a combination round that is both armor piercing and incendiary or tracer. Bottom line, if it’s military surplus and has a colored tip, it’s probably banned at our range.

We have not yet received our NRA Foundation grant money. With this money we will be putting on an event called 'Introduction to Competitive Shooting.' It’s currently scheduled for June 2, but it looks like we will have to postpone it for a while so that we have time to arrange for everything after we get the money. We may want to wait until fall when the weather is better, we will set a firm date sometime after we have the money in hand. If you are interested in helping out with the event, or would like to shoot, contact Dave Baalman at dpbaalman@msn.com , he will put you on an email list to be updated when we know more about the schedule.

If you receive the newsletter by US Mail, please take notice: it costs $150 each month just in postage to send the newsletter out, not to mention the cost of printing it. We would like to have you sign up to receive the newsletter by email, you will receive it days earlier than you do now, and there is the added benefit that if we need to get in touch with the club on short notice, the easiest way is to send out an email to the entire club. An example of this is when we installed the steel targets, we had less than a day’s notice that the range would be closed for several hours to install the targets, but we were able to get word out to over half the club by email. So we will make you a deal, if you send us your email address, we promise not to give it to a bunch of spammers, and we promise we will do our best to send out club wide emails for important notices whenever we can.

Another notice if you receive the newsletter by US Mail: if we have an email address attached to your name in the club database, we will begin using that email address for you starting next month. This will include the newsletter, special announcements, etc., and you will no longer receive the newsletter by US Mail. So if you gave us an email at some point, but it may have changed since, be sure to give us a new one. You can send an email to the Membership Coordinator at tcmsa11@gmail.com, be sure to include your name so that we can attach your email to the correct person in the club database. And don’t forget to check your junk or spam folder until you receive an email from us with the newsletter. If it does show up in your spam folder, be sure to add the webmaster account to your trusted email list so you don’t miss out on any special announcements.

Our proposal is pretty simple, but before everyone gets too excited, realize that this is NOT a move toward going to range officers like Rattlesnake. Instead what we are proposing is to have a volunteer at the range during peak hours only to act as an advisor. All members will still have to go through orientation, and all members will still have the gate combination and be able to shoot during any daylight hours after they complete orientation. The volunteers would just be another member at the range, however we would ask them to walk the line on occasion, talk to other shooters, and help them understand the rules when needed, answer any questions, and generally just help everyone follow the rules and be safe. We will be making an official recommendation to create the program at the May meeting, and will be passing this off to the Safety Committee. We will be asking the Safety Committee to come back with a formal proposal on how to run the program and a list of what costs if any will be involved, and will put it up for discussion and a vote of the membership at that time. We would like to keep the discussion on this topic to a minimum at the May meeting, since we don’t really know what the Safety Committee will come up with for a proposal right now. We will have an announcement in a future newsletter to let everyone know which meeting we will be discussing this at, so please hold your comment for that meeting, or better yet , if you have an opinion or an idea, we would love to have you volunteer for the safety committee so you can help shape the program. We will need several volunteers to help get this program off the ground, so if you are interested in helping out, contact Greg Hagen at 547-4705, or talk to him at the May meeting, or send an email to the club address.

For now we will be starting this as a pilot program, and hope to have it in place by fall, when range use gets heavy right before the general hunting season. After that, we will revisit it to see if we want to continue as is, make any changes, or drop the program.

Safe shooting, see you at the May meeting!!!