Find Your Range: Public Lands & Precision Shooting
David Higginbotham
SilencerCo’s latest installment of the “Find Your Range” video series, entitles “Sobchak Security LLC” spins some cautionary yarns in advocacy of a back-to-nature pursuit of solitude and an Emersonian look at self-reliance—for everything from connecting with a target at extended range to getting your chicken cooked.
The short film begins with a voice-over homage to Sam Elliott’s anchor character from the best film ever made: The Big Lebowski. While the allusion may not be immediately accessible to the uninitiated, it is unescapable in the oeuvre of this short film’s protagonists, Sobchack Security, a group that takes as their ethos an extension of the Coen’s cinematic motifs.
Sobchack Security LLC is a real company, one that doesn’t offer actual security services or any logical Lebowski bridge to their catalog of long-range shooting tools (a far cry from the contact distances preferred by the single-action packing Uzi-wielding Walter that provides inspiration for the company and its founders).
Sobchack Security LLG
Sobchack Security is a small company whose mission is long-distance cheat sheets. If you need to shoot at any distance, you’ll want to know some basics about your selected caliber, a lot about your scope, and have some good basic math skills. And Sobchak is there for you, and there to have fun, too.
While you can build a detailed dope-sheet, hand load rounds, and keep your Kestrel dialed in to exacting atmospheric conditions, many of us would rather take a more bare-bones approach to shooting and walk in rounds on the range. Like advanced plinking — which is always better with a silencer.
While nothing beats the thrill of a first-round hit, there’s also a feeling of accomplishment that comes from arcing in a heavy, suppressed round, finding your hold-over, and then making the magic happen, old-school style, the way old explorers, or even Thompson and Abbey would have done.
Sobchak Security has convenient tools—fast reference guides for common distances and calibers, as well as stickers you can use to keep relevant data close at hand (like inside your scope cap).
Why the running homage to Walter Sobchack, the Vietnam vet and consummate bowler that makes much of Jeffery Lebowski’s life hell in the 1998 Coen Brothers “Big Lebowski?”
Why, indeed. Let’s go bowling.
A deeper philosophy in “Find Your Range.”
Lebowski is set at the beginning of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, a war that Sobchak derides in on-screen diatribes that thread a fine line between philosophy and sophistry.
“Find Your Range” begins with a deeper analysis of the range itself, and draws inspiration not from Lebowski, but from one of the first ecoterrorists, Edward Abbey.
“We can have wilderness without freedom;” the narrator intones, “we can have wilderness without human life at all; but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.”
This quote is from Edward Abbey’s The Journey Home, in a chapter called “Freedom and Wilderness, Wilderness and Freedom.
“I see the preservation of wilderness as one sector of the front in the war against the encroaching industrial state,” Abbey’s chapter continues. “Every square mile of range and desert saved from the strip miners, every river saved from the dam builders, every forest saved from the loggers, every swamp saved from the land speculators means another square mile saved for the play of human freedom.”
Protect Your Rghts
It is this freedom that lies behind “Find Your Range.” The preservation of the land is not enough. We must continue to exercise our “human freedom.” Failing to do so is how we lose our rights.
“All this may seem utopian,” Abbey admits, and “impossibly idealistic. No matter. There comes a point at every crisis in human affairs when the ideal must become the real—or nothing.”
Abbey is the ideal voice to open a short cinematic reminder to embrace the wild. He would have felt right at home behind the trigger of a 6.5 Creedmor. “When guns are outlawed,” Abbey famously said, “only the Government will have guns. The Government – and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws.”
What has all this fantasizing to do with wilderness and freedom?
The film then shifts from Abbey’s mid-century musings to much older source material in its examination of the Louisiana Purchase.
“What has all this fantasizing to do with wilderness and freedom?” the narrator asks. “The modern American West traces its lineage back to this first great voyage into the unknown by Lewis and Clark, some 30 explorers and one dog.
“Today, some 85% of the area explored is owned by you and me: the American tax payers,” he concludes.
“The Beauty of the natural world is not to be taken for granted,” he continues—quoting Maryweather Lewis. “It is our duty to protect it for generations to come.”
Off-Grid in the Beehive State
Utah, home to SilencerCo, has an enviable amount of public lands. More than 12% of the state is comprised of National Parks. Much of the rest, an additional 42% (22.8 million acres) belongs to us in the form of BLM land. For those not privileged enough to live in the west, BLM land is about as close as you can get to truly public land.
Land governance aside, it is the sense of freedom the land provides that continues to be the draw for most. It is this spirit at the center of the next philosophical invocation of “Find Your Range.”
“Not me, buster,” Hunter Thompson wrote about giving in to terror after 9/11. “That’s why I live out here in the mountains with a flag on my porch and loud Wagner music blaring out of my speakers. I feel lucky, and I have plenty of ammunition. That is God’s will, they say, and that is also why I shoot into the darkness at anything that moves. Sooner or later, I will hit something Evil, and feel no Guilt. It might be Osama Bin Laden. Who knows?”
Here’s where the message of “Find Your Range” becomes literal. Get out there, the film pleads. Find the wide open spaces, “…beyond the watchful gaze of Karens and their counterparts, the overzealous range safety officer.”
Defiantly Mixing Metaphors
While the call to action seems clear enough, it remains the lone point where Sobchak Security breaks character. Walter Sobchak respects rules. The core attraction of bowling for Walter is its rules. Indeed he may be, as Smokey finds out when the muzzle end of Walter’s 1911A1 levels off in his face, the only one who really cares.
Of all the characters in “The Big Lebowski,” Walter would be most likely to be an “overzealous range safety officer.”
But leaving strict adherence to homage behind, “Find Your Range” shifts to some practical shooting tips. In its own way, Sobchak Security’s long-range refence cards are about using some immutable rules of physics to help you knock down some distant pins faster and more efficiently.
“When placing targets,” the narrator notes, “Walter has learned the hard way to select places where splash can easily be seen and corrections made.” And on screen we see what those of us who shoot at distance love to see—a linear cloud of dust on the ground below the target from the spall radiating into the ground.
Shooting out here, in the high desert of Utah, provides “…the benefit of far greater distances and more dynamic situations than are typical at most commercial ranges.” And, on BLM land, there’s no fee.
The shooting continues as the narrator chronicles the process. The three on screen “…focused their scopes on different targets and worked on the basics of bowling–setting up the best position you can, calculating range and estimating elevation holds using either Walter’s trusty homework stickers or a ballistic calculator, guesstimating a wind hold and then correcting for a miss.”
These are fundamental skills, and where the fun lies for many of us.
Getting Back to the Fundamentals
As the daylight fades in the desert, the distances traveled become lost in the darkness. Our three bowlers turn their efforts to the luxuries of car camping, beginning with cast iron, fire, and chicken. For this Walter, “…the joy of camping while on the road is enjoying the contrast between undeveloped surroundings with a meal that would stand up in the fanciest kitchen.”
In this darkness of this long day of long distances shots, the three turn back to philosophy. “From another dimension,” the narrator concludes, “Abby, Lewis, and Thompson must have smiled a little or at least not cursed our Trifecta as nihilists.”
“If you will it, it is no dream,” the narrator concludes (quoting the Coen’s Sobchak, who was quoting theologist Theodor Herzl.)
In the end, this eight-minute short is inspiring. Yes, Sobchack Security has tools to literally help you find your range, but our three protagonists are asking for more than that.
The call here is to find your range, literally. Find that place where you can embrace your freedoms and exercise your rights.
David Higginbotham
