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California Gun Laws Useless: Secret Underground Gun Range Goes Viral

By V. Saxena January 30, 2018 at 8:17am

California’s strict gun laws did nothing to stop a convicted felon from not only obtaining a firearm while on parole, but also using a private gun range underneath a Fresno County home to practice his firearm skills.

Authorities in Fresno County discovered the gun range while serving a search warrant on a home back in January of 2016, as reported by The Fresno Bee.

CBS affiliate KGPE further noted that the search warrant was one of many that were served “by approximately 80 officers from law enforcement agencies around the county, as part of MAGEC (Multi-Agency Gang Enforcement Consortium).”

The last thing Fresno authorities expected to find at the home, however, was this secret underground gun range:

Apparently, both the felon and whoever lived with him at the home sought to practice their firearm skills without being busted. And judging by how the authorities discovered their secret — via a totally unrelated search warrant — it appears the setup worked.

In fact, even the neighbors didn’t really notice.

“It appears that neighbors in the past had said that they heard gunshots coming from this residence, but they thought that they were airsoft guns — they were so quiet,” Tony Botti, the public information officer for the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office, told KGPE.

The felon and his associates accomplished this by using mattresses and blankets to muffle the noise. Botti pointed out, though, that what they did was not only illegal but dangerous as well.

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“Botti said they believe the residents were test firing guns, not taking into account the danger of a ricochet or the chance that a stray bullet could hit an innocent bystander,” KGPE reported.

And yet, stunningly enough, the felon and his cohorts got away with it for nobody knows how long.

Botti added that two people were arrested because of the search warrant — one for possession of narcotics, and the other for being a felon with a gun.

Does what happened in Fresno County disprove the usefulness of all gun laws? Of course not. Some basic laws should exist, obviously.

But others not so much.

I mean, if California authorities were unable to stop a convicted felon from obtaining a weapon and then test-firing it at a secret underground gun range, what makes the state think imposing burdensome regulations on law-abiding gun owners will make a difference?

Clever criminals will always discover ways to bypass the law, which is why the focus should not be on regulating law-abiding firearm owners, but rather on investigating and solving actual crimes — just like Fresno County authorities managed to do this time around.

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