Ironwood Forest shooters of saguaros strike again

The saguaros near Avra Hill were found a month or so ago with spent bullets and shells lying nearby, say members of the Arizona Native Plant Society who reported them to the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM's law-enforcement branch is investigating this incident -- one of two ongoing cactus-shooting investigations, said Mark Rekshynskyj, a BLM official in Tucson. ``It looks like they targeted the arms first and shot off the arms, then went to the bases and shot them down,'' said the plant society's John Scheuring. The dead cacti have become ammunition for plant advocates in a long-running conflict with shooters over whether recreational target shooting should be banned from the monument, now nearly 12 years old. The BLM is proposing to ban recreational shooting as part of a new management plan for the 129,000-acre monument. But the bureau is resisting a petition from nine groups including the plant society, the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society and Friends of Ironwood Forest, calling for an immediate ban instead of waiting until the agency can adopt the plan in six months to a year. The National Rifle Association opposes the ban as an overreaction and suggests that the bureau target specific monument areas for closing. The NRA is putting its weight behind a bill in Congress, sponsored by Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake, that would require congressional approval of a national monument recreational shooting ban lasting more than six months. The bill would make it BLM policy ``to keep national monument lands open to access and use for recreational shooting.''...more