The Quiet Corner is more rural than southern or central Connecticut, with large areas of farmland, rivers and lakes, and state forests. Its population centers are largely rural and semi-rural towns, many with populations below 5,000. It is one of the least-urbanized districts along the Northeast Megalopolis...The region is popular with tourists for its traditional New England scenery, culture, [and] locally produced foods.
But if we peel back the postcard veneer of Willington, what do we find?
- An interstate highway cutting across the town.
- Several main roads that see more than their share of dump trucks, semis, RVs, and motorcycles.
- A large scale rock quarry
- A major highway rest stop
How quiet can Willington be, then? What's an admittedly necessary gun range going to do but add a small amount of noise to this already existing cacophony?
This would be an absolutely fair question if:
1. we were dealing with general noise
2. we were dealing with a simple gun range
Let's look at what Willington is facing in terms of noise.
Road noise, while sometimes certainly loud in Willington (as anyone living on Tolland Turnpike can attest), more or less stays at a hum. There are ebbs and flows in the hum, and it's always a nice break when commuter traffic has settled down for the night and things get quieter, but overall, it's a noise that is consistent enough to become background information.
However, when something happens to change the hum of that background noise- a dump truck engaging its air brakes, for example, the nature of the noise changes. It is no longer background noise. And, if it is a sudden, sharp, unexpected noise, it becomes a particular kind of sound known as an impulse noise.
And impulse noises have devastating effects on humans, particularly children.
According to a study on children and noise, conducted by the World Health Organization, children can suffer profound psychological damage from impulse noise:
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| (source) |
Guns, like the ones the State Police will be employing 5-7 days a week, from 9:a.m. until dusk (with night shooting admittedly on the docket), constitute impulse noise- the sudden, unexpected sound that can do physical and psychological damage to children.
So we're not talking about adding "just more noise" to the not-so-quiet-corner of Willington. We're talking about the addition of a specific, detrimental sound to the lives of children (and everyone else) in a rural town.
Secondly, this is not "just a gun range". In addition to the sprawling complex the size of the White House, the State Police are starting out with four gun ranges.* Four ranges that can be used simultaneously, creating a great wave of impulse noise, or one at a time, drawing out the sound of gun fire for hours and hours.
Pistols, rifles, semi-automatic and automatic weapons will be used. Specialty equipment will be used. The State Police refuse to provide a list of all the weapons that will be employed on the gun range, so the residents of Willington have no way to know just what is awaiting them.
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| No complete list of weapons to be used on the firing ranges has been provided to the people of Willington. (source) |
It is true that Willington is not a silent town. We won't be silent about the addition of a 327 acre training compound that will fill the air with the sounds of physically and psychologically damaging gun fire.
The question remains- why are the State Police trying to buy up private land in the middle of a rural town, rather than revamping existing facilities or employing already owned state land in a more suitable location?
As for a State Police answer to that question, all we hear are crickets.
* For reference, the current State Police training center in Simsbury, CT, only has two ranges, and due to the layout of the facility, they cannot be used concurrently. This means that if the State Police are allowed to construct their complex in Willington, there will be four times the gun fire that the residents of Simsbury currently have to endure.
