Dear MSSA Friends,
You may be interested in the letter MSSA just sent Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke about his bill to prohibit dispossession of federal land parcels larger than 300 acres. See below for the text of this letter (sent on MSSA letterhead).
Best wishes,
Gary
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December 2, 2025
The Honorable Ryan Zinke
U.S. House of Representatives
512 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-2600
Dear Congressman Zinke,
Greetings from Missoula. This message is about the Public Lands in Public Hands Act which you recently introduced, and about shooting ranges in Montana.
In 2008, I was invited to and attended the White House Conference on North American Wildlife Policy, held in Reno, Nevada on October 1-3 of 2008. This conference was a Really Big Deal. It was held pursuant to a directing Executive Order by the President, the Vice President was the keynote speaker, and was attended by the Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture and by hundreds of other elected and appointed federal, state, and local officials. The declared purpose of this Conference was to hammer out policy goals for North American wildlife for the next century.
Of the hundreds of attendees, I was the only one who came with a prepared resolution to submit for consideration by the Conference. That resolution directed that when federal land managers create required land use plans that they must designate a suitable location on managed federal land within reasonable travel distance of each nearby community for a shooting range.
This resolution was adopted by the Conference and the intent was expressed in the final Conference report created and published by the President’s Office of Management and Budget.
Ryan, you may remember from your time in the Montana Legislature that the Montana Shooting Sports Association kicked off the Shooting Range Development Program (SRDP) in 1989, for our Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks to use some hunter license fee monies to make matching grants to local shooting clubs for shooting range development. We believe fervently that Montana people need and deserve safe and suitable places to shoot near the communities where they live. The SRDP was codified in law in 1999 because of a bill MSSA brought. It has been a highly successful program with an estimated $25 million having been invested in Montana shooting ranges since the program’s inception.
MSSA has long played nursemaid and midwife to the SRDP. Every legislative session, we return to the Legislature and fight for a healthy appropriation to fund the program. We’ve spent countless hours advising local clubs about range design and creation of fund-able SRDP grant applications.
Throughout all of this, the greatest barrier to expanding ranges and establishing new ranges has been finding and affording suitable land.
This brings me to your Public Lands in Public Hands Act. According to media reports, this Act would restrict federal dispossession of parcels greater than 300 acres. To be direct, Montana shooting ranges need to be able to obtain up to 640 acres. This specific exception for shooting ranges should be in your bill. Let me explain.
When MSSA advises clubs nowadays about establishing or expanding ranges, we strongly advise the range have a footprint suitable, now or in the future, for shooting out to 1,000 yards. While 1,000 yards would just barely squeeze inside a 300-acre square, that is not enough space to include a safety zone downrange and necessary infrastructure up-range such as shooting cover, parking and associated buildings.
Further, MSSA is absolute in advising shooting clubs that they must own the land for their range. If they don’t have the security of ownership, club officials and members simply will not invest the money and volunteer hours needed to develop and manage the range. So, a mechanism needs to be built into your bill for the deed (or a permanent easement) to a 640-acre parcel of federally-managed public land to end up in the hands of the club managing the range, possibly with a pass-through involving the state or the county in which the range is located. The public interest could be protected with a reversion clause should the range fall into disuse.
A good example of how this would work is with a range project in Dillon for which MSSA was the midwife. There, BLM land was transferred to the County for a range, and the county then transferred the land to the managing club.
For more side rails, definition of eligible grant recipients for SRDP grants are defined in Montana law at 87-1-277-279. This criteria could be borrowed to define clubs eligible to receive federally-managed public land for shooting ranges.
Making these adjustments to your bill would make sense for Montana and would be consistent with policy established by the 2008 White House Policy Conference.
Thank you for your interest in this issue for Montana. I invite any ongoing dialog about this.
Sincerely,
Gary Marbut
President, Montana Shooting Sports Association
Cc: Montana Land Board
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Gary Marbut, President
Montana Shooting Sports Association
Author, Gun Laws of Montana