The club abuts the Musquash Conservation Area, which is near the Londonderry Fish and Game Club’s shooting range. The Town Council agreed to hold a meeting in the area to hear first-hand the volume of the gunshots about which golfers and residents have complained for nearly 20 years.
Golfers and residents at Londonderry (N.H.) Country Club are complaining about the sound of gunshots from the nearby Musquash Conservation Area, the Londonderry Patch reported.
The club’s owner, Tom Kimball, raised the issue at the latest Town Council meeting. The Londonderry Fish and Game Club’s shooting range sits across the Musquash conservation land to the south of the country club. Kimball said the gunshots are so loud, they sound like they’re only a few feet away, Patch reported.
“It’s disrupting the peace and dignity of the residents,” Kimball said. He added that some residents report the gunshots to police, not realizing they are coming from the nearby ranges.
Councilor Joe Green said he heard gunshots from the shooting ranges just this weekend, Patch reported.
“I was on the soccer field Sunday and there was loud banging. Kids there said, ‘What’s going on?’ and I said there was a firing range pretty close,” Green said. “It’s an education process. Maybe people just don’t realize it’s there until they hear the gunshots, but it was like a cowboy shoot-out Sunday.”
Council Chairman John Farrell suggested an upcoming council meeting be moved to the area to hear first-hand the impact of the gunshots, Patch reported.
“We’ll ask the police department if they could go out and use the firing range so we could all understand what Mr. Kimball’s business is facing and see if we could all put our heads together,” Farrell said. “I don’t know the answer, but what I do know is that I’m not going to find it sitting in this room.”
Kimball suggested that the shooting be moved to an indoor firing range at an existing facility or one that is yet to be built, Patch reported.
“Now that we have more and more police and there’s over 500 members of the Fish and Game Club out there, it seems reasonable that either they go and support that (Manchester) business or build a new facility to compensate all this shooting that has to go on,” Kimball told the council.
Kimball added that he put forward an ordinance to ban outdoor shooting in Londonderry in 1990, but that measure failed, Patch reported.
“I have been through this before with Town Council and with police chiefs, not you guys, but back in 1990,” he told the councilors. “You have known you have a problem here for over 20 years and now you’re just getting around to it.”
Londonderry Police Chief and Acting Town Manager William Hart said the police department is ready to participate in the test and assist the club in finding answers to the problem, Patch reported.
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