Even in very gun friendly areas ranges are always few, far between and often with years long wait lists for membership. Private property is often the only option, but it needs to be done safely. It sounds like every one of his neighbors had backstops for their home ranges, this dude was just a moron.
Cool, so only criminals who are slightly dedicated to breaking the law get guns and no one else. Got it.
They are highly effective at ensuring that people who do not break laws cannot get guns easily.
The JetBlue pilot has no idea what the other crew was doing. The military flies due regard all the time and when they do, it is on them to deconflict with traffic. The JetBlue pilot might have been surprised by them but they almost certainly weren’t surprised by JetBlue and would have deviated if it actually got close.
Most of the world doesn’t have decent primary radar, especially out over international waters like where this occurred. Likely just a low frequency radar that can say “yup, there’s something out there” but not “he is right there.” The world works on transponders.
So they were 3-ish, maybe 5 miles away with altitude separation over international water? That’s actually fairly routine.
But supposedly we’re getting kei cars, so at least there’s that.
That’s the thing, they aren’t buying up “troubled” things, they’re looking for high return investments to future proof them against the decline of oil or anything that buys them western influence or street cred. A disgraced, homicidal, drug using pilot isn’t any of those things.
He might be able to get away with a flying gig somewhere in the world but not in any first or second world and most third world countries. Saudi is way too on top of their shit to allow his dumb ass in a cockpit again; his only options are truly the bottom of the barrel worldwide.
The FAA will never issue him even a private pilot certificate again in his entire life, let alone a commercial to be allowed to fly as a bush pilot.
Saudi isn’t the type of country that would overlook this, especially with the taboo on drug use in the Middle East.
The countries that would overlook this are few and far between with other serious issues making it not worth trying.
This is nothing new or unique. As much as it sucks when it’s blatantly obvious like this, there isn’t a true and objective way to draw perfect districts. If you cut the state into perfect squares then you group completely unrelated communities on either side of a large river that have nothing in common and one overwhelms the other. Sometimes one niche population is one county over from another one that’s twice the size. A lot of times a certain state does have a serious political bias. Independent districting committees with members from both sides still come up with wildly gerrymandered maps. A lot of times they aim for “highly competitive” elections where both sides have a real chance at winning any given election, but if the state is genuinely deep blue or red, that’s gerrymandered as well even if it “feels” democratic. 538 had an awesome map where you could visualize unfair advantages for each, highly competitive districts, compact districts (no absurd shapes like this one) and compact but follows existing county lines, but when ABC bought them they gutted everything good about 538 and just used the name for their existing garbage election reporting hoping to lure in a few more viewers so it’s now wiped off the face of the internet.
It’s only a small portion of Austin. If you take a sliver of a city where 20k people live and add it to a large rural district with 30k people across thousands of square miles you then spread the population of the dense city across the rural districts without overwhelming the ratio.
Much of the country it is a nightmare finding a place to shoot. I’m moving to Charleston SC at the end of the summer, I already reached out to the main range around there and they aren’t even accepting new people to the wait list. They’re hoping to maybe open the wait list back up in April or so.
When I lived in Northern Virginia someone finally built a very nice 100 yd indoor range and it was only a 45 minute drive from my apartment. Then the owner retired after 5-10 years and the town where it was located flat out told him “we will never approve the permits for you to ever sell it to another person. Sell it to us so we can make it a private police training facility or you will never see a penny.”
I’ve lived in many states, and it was almost always at least an hour to the nearest range. Right now I shoot on a private farm 10 minutes away and it’s beautiful.