Yesterday I got a call from Mike, an ATFE agent from Spokane. AGENT, not inspector.
On December 28th of last year I took my cousin Julia on a Boomershoot Adventure at a local gravel pit. As we were finishing up somebody that lived nearby showed up to complain about the explosions. Ry and Lyle tried to talk to him but he wasn’t interested in listening. He finally took down my license plate number and left.
The agent wanted to know what was going on. I asked if he knew that I had a license to manufacture explosives. He said no and I gave him my ATFE type 20 license to manufacture number and told him Sue (an inspector who works on the Spokane office and he knows) is coming down to inspect my new magazine next week and that she could probably give him more background on me if he wanted it. He wanted to know what type of explosives we had and if anyone else had explosives. I said a friend, Ry Jones, helped me mix them on site but we didn’t transport anything like that on the road. He also wanted to know about a “boomer club”. I told him a rough overview of the Boomershoot and directed him to boomershoot.org. He said that the guy seemed pretty determined to try and “do something” and that we might want to find another place to set things off. I suspect the neighbor guy didn’t get any satisfaction from the local sheriff and so he contacted the ATF.
I told him that we talked to the guy but nothing we could say could make him happy. I also said we had talked to the owner of the pit and he didn’t have problem with it. He thanked me for answering his questions and I told him to call me anytime something came up because I didn’t want to cause any problems and wanted to avoid stepping on people’s toes.