Jeff Soyer reports that the EPA is looking to go after the Philadelphia Gun Club, which is not actually in Philadelphia, but rather in Bucks County, in Bensalem Township. The real beef is that PGC is a pigeon shooting club, and a lot of the club’s neighbors are unhappy with the attention it’s bringing to the neighborhood, and with finding dead birds on their property. While I get PGC has a long tradition (Ernest Hemingway was a member), I’ve long maintained that Bensalem probably isn’t the best place in the world to pick a fight over pigeon shooting. Looks like the EPA is going to step in:
David Sternberg, an EPA spokesman, said the agency was required by statute to conduct a preliminary assessment of the Philadelphia Gun Club after a “citizen petition.”
The petition was filed by the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, a nonprofit that seeks to protect the watershed. The organization said it conducted tests earlier this year that revealed high levels of lead in samples taken from sediment on the banks of the river along the club’s property. The club has been in operation for more than 100 years.
The article notes that the club decided to pay off the petitioner previously, to the tune of 15 grand. They never should have done such a thing. Most other clubs don’t have that kind of money and you’ve just taught anti-gun and anti-shooting activists that this can be a successful method for shaking down clubs. That kind of Danegeld would bankrupt most clubs.
I don’t know, the clubs I belong to have a pretty healthy nest egg they’re sitting on along with great revenue from the bar and weekend kitchen.
I was waiting for Delaware Riverkeepers to drop the lead shoe. It was only a matter of time. I’ve always been on Philadelphia Gun Club’s side on the pigeon issue — “on principle” — but I also knew their intransigence was going to eventually call attention to the Achille’s Heel of many other clubs. I’m surprised Riverkeepers took this long to play that card.
Can’t say I’m sorry. These guys are only slightly below school shootings in terms of being a PR trainwreck for gun owners. Fat old crackers shooting birds in a box; not really anyone I want to be associated with.
More like rich WASPs at that club. It’s pretty exclusive. And they don’t shoot them in a box, they are released by a trapper. It’s like trap only with live birds instead of clay birds, and my understanding is that it’s much much harder.
Having watched videos of the events, I have to disagree. I’m a crappy to mediocre trap shooter at best and nothing about these shoots appears “much harder”. All I see is a bunch of creepy folks that kill things for entertainment. If they look that way to me, I can only imagine the impression they leave on non-hunting, non-gun owning folks. Fortunately most of them look like they’re one foot in the grave anyhow.
Then come to an event and enter…. I’ll be happy to watch your $ fly away. If it’s not “much harder”, the pay out will be worth it at a sanctioned event. Longest run, plus middle 15, plus 1st place can easily be in the thousands and if there are enough shooters over ten thousand.
I’ve watched videos of NASCAR and drag racing. Looks pretty easy from the couch.
“More like rich WASPs at that club.”
Their president is or was a member of our club, too. He was a pretty significant person with some regional agencies, as I recall, and I also think he was a NRA Director, though via appointment to fill a vacancy, if I recall correctly.
Switch to clay birds, it will take the heat off, if that doesn’t work steel shot……and tell the EPA to go pound sand
I’m on our side, but, download this document from the EPA wesbsite and study it thoroughly.
Once you do I think you will see who will be telling who to pound sand, if the EPA were to get a big enough bug up its ass. To date we are coasting.
Fat sick sadistic males can’t get it up for their wives and are
Too incompetent for fair chase hunting decide to torture little pigeons
Ted bundy and other psychopathic pedophiles also abused animals