The sign-shooters

Ok, sign-shooters - enough is enough! I can not even imagine what goes through your heads when you raise your rifle, handgun, or shotgun and blaze away at the assorted signs in the forest and desert.

Grow up, will you! The cost for replacing those signs that you just have to shoot up is no small number. Land managers place them in the locations you find them for a good reason, and not for you screwballs to use as targets. Even safety signs, such as stop signs, and curve warnings are shot to smithereens.

Shooting signs comes under the heading of Criminal Mischief. It's a crime.

Then there's the issue of where those rounds go after they blast a hole in an aluminum sign. Every person who shoots a firearm knows how deadly that instrument can be - whether he or she wants to recognize it or not - not caring where that round, or rounds, go is reckless, as in:

• 163.195: Recklessly endangering another person

(1) A person commits the crime of recklessly endangering another person if the person recklessly engages in conduct which creates a substantial risk of serious physical injury to another person.

Recklessly endangering another person is a Class A misdemeanor, and that's an automatic one year in the clink, and if the piece that fires the round(s) happens to be one of the high-velocity weapons that shoots flat for half-a-mile, no one is safe on the desert or in the forest anymore.

Just plain common sense and good citizenship should convince sign-shooters that there are places to shoot, and there are places not to shoot.

I spend a lot of time traveling on the back-of-beyond roads conducting wildlife surveys; while doing so recently, I got myself lost in Northern Lake County and in an area that I thought was so primitive only a few people a year would find it. Yet there were BLM boundary and bearing signs and other markers - all shot to pieces.

I've talked to the folks in the Forest Service and BLM who have to replace those shot-to-hell signs. I would like to quote their description of the kind of people who shoot signs, but this is a family newspaper, and some of those adjectives and pronouns would make a sailor blush.

The Forest Service has a policy of replacing safety signs first; stop, curve and truck traffic warnings. Those cost $200 each, and it doesn't stop there: labor often runs to about $50 an hour.

Gavin Hoban, who has the responsibility of replacing stolen and shot-up signs on the thousands of acres of BLM lands in the Prineville District, sighs as he addresses the enormous problems he has with maintaining signs:

"I don't have a dollar number figure as it varies fairly widely from year to year, as does BLM's ability to replace a given sign due to variability of resources, both in staff and funding. However, I know it's in the many thousands of dollars per year. Signs are not cheap and we do our best to obtain bulk discounts and utilize volunteer labor, but a single large area sign will run $500-$700 each in purchase costs alone.

"Add staff and equipment costs and the expense of sign vandalism escalate rapidly. As the Sisters-Redmond-Prineville-Bend area is located in the urban interface with its irregular land ownership pattern, sign-shooters often do not consider the neighbors, recreationists and others nearby who may be on the receiving end of a given volley.

"In some areas, BLM has enjoyed some success in reducing sign and facility damage by providing intentionally designed access points and trailheads which funnel visitors through maintained and easily patrolled and more highly visible portals. Some examples of such access are coming online at Cline Buttes Recreation Area right now."

Sign-shooting lays a burden on legitimate shooters who conduct themselves responsibly. They shoot in safe locations, pick up their spent casings and use targets that can be used to further the sport they enjoy.

The NRA, in their zeal to make sure Americans are never without the firearms to protect our liberty, should also make sure the irresponsible idiots who are shooting up American property have their guns removed from them - forever. We'd all be better off, and safer.