Our club requires each member to do 18-hours a year   of service time. One way to satisfy that requirement is to  serve as a RSO (Range Safety Officer. I joined in 1978.

In the early ‘80’s the club was open to the public and I was an RSO. There were (3) guys attempting to sight in a Remington 700 (.30-06) @ 100 yards. They didn’t look like they were having much luck hitting their target. 

After a brief time I happened to look behind the firing line. There the (3) of them were, standing by a tree. They had the barrel of the rifle in the notch of the fork of the tree, looking like the brainstorm was to “bend” the barrel to improve its accuracy. 

Before they were at it long enough to break the stock I stopped them. Don’t know if they were strong enough to influence the position of the barrel but I didn’t want to know.   

I told them to pack-up, gave them their range fee back and asked them to leave and not come back to our range. I told them that what they were trying do would not solve any accuracy issues and what they were doing was a huge safety concern. No way was I going try to sight-in their rifle for them. Besides that not being something the RSO should do, there was also a personal safety thing, at least for me.

These (3) guys appeared to have a common foreign country lineage. That part of the world will remain nameless.

The lesson for me was whenever out @ the range ALWAYS look around, because you never know….

Tom

We open up our range every fall for three weekends before hunting season, and charge the public to sight in their hunting rifles. We try to have one member for each shooter to maintain safety and guide shooters through the process. 
Some shooters are well prepared and don't take long to get their rifles sighted in. Others have brand new guns and scopes, and have not even bore sighted them, so it takes forever to get them on paper. And some are such poor shots that even when they have an accurate setup I wonder how they'll ever bring home any game?
We've had numerous cases of a shooter showing up with the wrong ammo, so we have to do everything we can to try and make sure the cartridge is correct for the rifle they brought to shoot. Had one guy bring a .30-06 rifle and .308 ammo once. He couldn't figure out why his gun wouldn't shoot well, and why brass had blown out the first shot he fired! He was adamant that he'd fired the same ammo in it before.

Burntwater, Sorry to hear your rifles were stolen. That's some thing that always concerned me. If there is some one on the line I know and trust, I'll leave my rifle on the bench when I go down range. If I'm alone especially I'll carry the hardware with me. Ain't it a shame.

We had to drive an antelope (OK, pronghorn) off the grass in front of the 200 meter berm.

When we have the ISSA Int'l Matches on the Whittington Center Coors range in Raton each summer we hire a lookout to keep watch for game around the targets.  We get a lot of Elk and white tail.  I've heard that there have even been bears in the past (before my time).

Two years ago we had a pronghorn who wandered across the line between the benches and the 100 yard line during one of the matches.  He was chased off.  A few minutes later he came back.  Chased away again.  Repeat.  The I think it was the fourth time one of the guys took his electric bicycle and chased him a long way off.   

I finally thought of something amazing I saw at a rifle range. To me it was amazing, maybe only to me. It was at the rifle range in Golden in either 1986 or 88. I was watching Lones Wigger getting ready to shoot. Lones was so nervous and shaky he could hardly handle simple tasks at his bench. After a couple minutes he left and went down to the concession stand and got a cup of coffee and a piece of chocolate cake, sat down at a table and quietly consumed his coffee and cake. He then went back up to his bench, calmly sat down and proceeded to kick everyones ass. I remember wondering what he could have been so nervous about.

I shot a NRA Midrange match at van Meter, IA. We were shooting at 600 yds with scopes. All of sudden something appeared in my scope. Little heads were popping up in the scope. Turkeys were feeding in front of the 300 yd firing points. The bullets passing above them didn’t bother them.