shooting-range, trainingI’m looking to buy my first firearm – a shotgun for home defense.
My biggest obstacle is that I have no place to safely fire it. I live in an apartment in a suburban area. All the ranges/shooting clubs in the area are closed to new members.
There are some state forests and parks within an hour or so (New York state). Can I find a secluded spot and legally do some target shooting? Where else can I shoot?
EDIT: I’m in upstate New York. Albany/Saratoga Springs area.
First the bad news - to the best of my knowledge, there are NO public ranges in NY. Anywhere.
Now for the good news - you most likely know someone who has land far enough away from a city center that you can shoot 100% legally. I grew up in Albany and Cohoes, and did all of my shooting at someone's house in rural-to-semi-rural Albany, Columbia, Rensselear, Schenectady, Saratoga, or Washington Counties.
Safety laws in NY require (to the best of my knowledge) that you be at least 500 feet from a building unless you have the owner's permission. Especially with a shotgun, this means that pretty much if you have an acre of land available, and some chunk of that is a hill and/or woodsy area, you have a safe backstop.
If you're shooting somewhere that doesn't have a lot of gun owners / hunters (or is quasi-populated like some of the fringes of Castleton are), you may want to call the local police/sheriff office to let them know you'll be shooting.
You may also call your law enforcement office to see if they have any suggestions. In some [very] small towns, the police department might even allow you to use (under supervision) their range for handgun/shotgun shooting.
WRT ranges - there are several gun clubs you should be able to become a member of in and around Albany (Forbes and Watervliet (518-456-9855) come to mind [presuming they're still operating, I haven't lived there in almost 10 years]). Some more may be findable here http://www.traderscreek.com/gun_clubs/new_york.asp.
Check out http://wheretoshoot.org/index.cfm , it is a good search engine for finding ranges all across the country. After doing a search it revealed roughly 50 different ranges for the state of New York.
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