Editor,

Recently, the Thompson Falls Trap Club installed stanchions and provided wooden frames with cardboard to attach targets in the pistol and rifle range. Our goal was to improve the public’s shooting experience at the Thompson Falls Range.

The metal stanchions were secured to the ground with four spikes at their base and extended four inches above the ground with a rectangular tube that holds a four or five-foot-tall wooden frame, twenty inches in width, with cardboard attached to the frames that targets are secured to. The stanchions and the wooden target frames with cardboard were all provided to the public at no charge, however we do encourage membership to the Trap Club at the modest cost of ten dollars per person or fifteen dollars per family to help cover the required NRA liability insurance to keep the Range open.

One week to the day of installation of the stanchions, the Trap Club members inspected the range to find five of the metal frames had been destroyed by bullet holes through the four-inch vertical metal receptacles that hold the wooden target frames.

We were, however, very impressed by the accuracy of the shooting public that could put six or seven rounds in a very tight pattern, into a two-inch-wide metal tubing only four inches off the ground at fifty yards! Even more impressive was the accuracy of the one-hundred-yard shooter that destroyed the stanchion by putting rounds in each of the four-inch-high rectangular tubing which were not visible by the naked eye from the shooting hut! The two stanchions, destroyed at the pistol range, were another outstanding demonstration of marksmanship on the tubing.

How did you do it? We congratulate you on destroying the stanchions that retail for over twenty dollars each, and not hitting the replaceable wooden uprights that hold the targets at a cost of only two dollars and fifty cents. Job well done!

Cliff Farrier, Thompson Falls Trap Club, Secretary/Treasurer