Finally today, after we reported on the National Guard’s plan to try using lead bullets at their firing ranges, a reader sent us an email about another environmental issue surrounding a government organizations’ plan to set up a firing range: the Coast Guard has planned to turn Lake Michigan into “the world’s largest freshwater live-fire shooting range.”
The United States Coast Guard has announced plans to turn the Great Lakes, the world’s largest body of fresh water, into the world’s largest freshwater shooting range. Since 1817, a treaty between the U.S. and Canada prohibited this kind of activity on the Great Lakes. But when President Bush made the Coast Guard part of the Department of Homeland Security in 2004, he reinterpreted the agreement with Canada.
The Coast Guard has installed machine guns, capable of firing 600 rounds per minute, on its Great Lakes vessels and has begun target practice on the lakes. Now the Coast Guard wants to designate 34 areas in the lakes as permanent target ranges for practice with live ammunition. The areas they have mapped out come within five miles of the shore and can be seen with the naked eye from the water’s edge. They are strung around the perimeter of all five Great Lakes (Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, and Lake Huron). In keeping with the Bush administration’s practice of giving misleading names to its initiatives, the Coast Guard is calling the target ranges “safety zones.”
Of course, these zones are anything but safe. Not only are they firing live ammunition into the water (using firearms is never safe, no matter what precautions are taken), but they’re firing tons of lead directly into a balanced coastal environment. And that’s clearly a bad idea– lead is poisonous, and introducing it in large quantities into any kind of natural environment is simply asking for trouble. Just like the National Guard shooting range, either the Coast Guard will have to do what they can to minimize the damage, or simply find some other way to practice target shooting.
Environmentalists are dubious of the Coast Guard’s claims that dumping an estimated 43,000 lead bullets into the lakes each year will have no adverse environmental impact on fish, birds, mammals, plants, or humans. Consistent with the military’s view that they should be exempt from environmental regulations, the Coast Guard has not prepared a complete environmental impact statement. Their own internal study says that if the environmental risk reached a rank of 1.00 on their scale, the program would need further study. However, the Coast Guard says the program’s risk is 0.96, so they are not concerned. The Coast Guard’s risk assumptions only assume the shooting will take place for a period of five years, although the Coast Guard has announced no such limit on their plans for shooting in the lakes.
Our lakes are an international treasure, enjoyed by nature-lovers, boaters, fishers, and swimmers, and a critical resource for commercial fisheries, transportation, and shipping. The lakes are also the source of drinking water for millions of people. They should not be turned into a target range, endangering anyone who ventures out onto the lakes. They should not be unnecessarily polluted by lead and other toxins. There are alternatives to the Coast Guard’s plan. There must be some limit to the militarization of our society, and this is an important and symbolic place for those of us who work for peace and who value the environment to stand our ground.
Now, is this a major reason to fight for laws against guns and gun violence? Not at all. There are plenty more persuasive reasons to fight for stronger gun laws, not least of which is that guns are, in fact, physically dangerous. The more of them there are to go around, the more violence appears, plain and simple, and that won’t change whether the Coast Guard shoots 3,000 or 43,000 lead bullets into the Great Lakes.
But an environmental issue like this is just another nail into an increasingly fastened coffin. If the National and Coast Guards are taking this little care in deciding what their actions do to the environment, how about all the other firing ranges currently in business around the country? An problem like this, no matter what size, adds up. Sure, there are plenty of other reasons to oppose an abundance of firearms. But this is just one more. We want to protect our citizens– but we also have a responsiblity to protect our environment, and supporting an abundance of firearms causes us to fail at both.
