Posted: 10/4/2004 11:58:30 AM EDT
Did anyone see this? I was googling for the number for Calverton Shooting Range and I found this article. <BACK> (c) 2003 New York Times Company October 5, 2003
Security Questions at Shooting Ranges
CALVERTON -- ALMOST anyone with $10 for admission can use the Calverton Shooting Range, a private, no-frills outdoor range whose owner, a fervent believer in the right to bear arms, asks few questions of his armed customers.
''If somebody smells of drink we don't let them in,'' said the owner, George Schmelzer, an 86-year-old former duck farmer who has operated the range since 1965 on 91 acres of land he owns near Exit 71 of the Long Island Expressway.
There are few other rules for sober shooters as they blast away at posted targets in the excavated sand pits. ''It's in the Constitution that people have a right,'' Mr. Schmelzer said in a recent interview. ''When everybody has a gun you have less crime. It's proven that way.''
On Long Island, where indoor and outdoor pistol and rifle ranges run the gamut from highly to loosely organized, the Calverton range stands out as among the most permissive, according to some law enforcement officials and town officials who are familiar with it.
Now, the range, which is located in the Town of Brookhaven but should not be confused with the town-operated shooting range on Old Country Road east of the William Floyd Parkway, has taken a small place in a dark history. A recently published book about international terrorism and the beginnings of Al Qaeda, ''1000 Years for Revenge,'' reports that a group of terrorists-in-training from a Brooklyn mosque used the range for target practice on four weekends in July 1989.
The author, Peter Lance, says the F.B.I. had the men under surveillance and photographed them shooting AK-47's and other weapons at the Calverton range. But, Mr. Lance contended in the book and a recent interview, the F.B.I. failed to recognize that it was seeing the beginnings of a terrorist network whose members were later involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, plots to bomb bridges and tunnels, and the attacks of Sept. 11.
Mr. Schmelzer, who did not recall the men, said little had changed at his range since 1989. He said he required customers who wanted to shoot pistols to show pistol permits but made no other attempt to screen those who came through his gates. ''This is not Asia or Eastern Europe,'' he said. ''They wouldn't tell me the truth anyway.''
He said that while he had never seen anyone who raised his suspicions, there was no way he could recognize or keep out terrorists. ''What do you expect me to do?'' he said. ''The government lets them in, Bush and that liar Clinton let them in, they stuck up for illegal aliens, they favored them. The government is at fault.''
A state law prohibits firing within 500 feet of homes, and shooting range operators also need permits from local governments. Range operations are otherwise unregulated, and police officials agree that they have little authority over ranges on private property unless incidents occur or owners call them in.
Sgt. Michael S. Esposito, the executive officer of the pistol licensing bureau for the Suffolk County Police Department, said he was troubled that ''there are no guidelines for operating a range outside of common sense, and no governing body outside of the building department that goes in there and routinely does inspections.''
While pistol owners are required to carry permits, range owners are not required to ask for them. No permit is required for rifles or shotguns.
Sergeant Esposito and a Nassau County Police Department spokesman, Sgt. Anthony Repalone, said the police had no policy for spot checks at ranges to see if people firing pistols had licenses.
''As far as walking in and asking people to see permits, no, we don't do that,'' Sergeant Esposito said.
Gun rights advocates say this is as it should be. ''This is still America,'' said Thomas H. King, the president of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, the National Rifle Association affiliate in New York. ''The police and any other authoritative group have no right to come on private property without permission. I have no problem if that permission is granted by the range operator or owner.''
But Mr. King said range owners needed to be more vigilant after 9/11. ''If it wasn't for 9/11 these questions wouldn't come up,'' he said. He said that range operators ''now have to be more careful, more judicious about who is shooting at their ranges.''
Richard P. D'Alauro of Huntington Station, an N.R.A. field representative for an area including Long Island, said he had no concern that any ranges were used by terrorists. ''Our authorities are all over that,'' he said. ''That would be the last place in the world where you would find terrorists.''
But Mr. Lance, a former correspondent for ABC News, says in ''1000 Years for Revenge'' that of all of the F.B.I.'s missed opportunities to stop the attacks of Sept. 11, the first occurred at the Calverton shooting range 14 years ago.
According to the book, several Middle Eastern men with direct links to what was to become Al Qaeda drove from the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn to the Calverton shooting range on four successive weekends beginning on July 2, 1989. Mr. Lance writes that under surveillance by the F.B.I.'s Special Operations Group, the men were photographed as they fired AK-47 assault rifles, semiautomatic handguns and revolvers during what appeared to be training sessions.
Mr. Lance said the shooters included El Sayyid A. Nosair, a 34-year-old Egyptian who organized the assassination a year later of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the radical Jewish Defense League. Others at the Calverton sessions included Mahmud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, who were convicted in 1994 of bombing the World Trade Center the year before, and Ali Mohammed, a former officer in the Egyptian Army whose unit was linked, Mr. Lance said, to the 1981 assassination of the Egyptian president, Anwar el-Sadat.
His book accuses the F.B.I. of failing to connect the dots of an emerging terrorist network and allowing its leaders to slip away. In the case of the Calverton group, he said, the F.B.I. ceased its surveillance following the four shooting sessions for reasons he said remaining puzzling.
James Margolin, a special agent in the New York City office of the F.B.I., would neither confirm nor deny that the agency had Middle Eastern men under surveillance at the Calverton range in 1989. ''Going to a shooting range is not a federal crime,'' he said, adding that he had perused Mr. Lance's book and ''I don't see a great deal in the book that hasn't previously been discussed by other authors.''
|
|