Micah McNally is 11 years old and attends South Shore K-8. These should still be the carefree days of his youth, but they aren’t so carefree anymore.
During a recent three-day stretch, a bullet casing was found in his driveway; the next day, his school initiated a shelter-in-place protocol because of a gun-related incident at the Rainier Beach Community Center next door; and the following day, some 50 casings were left on a street from a shootout just down the block.
Disconcerting and distressing as it is for kids like McNally, not all of the gunfire heard in Rainier Beach is the result of gun violence. Some of it comes from the people charged with protecting the public.
“We heard all those shots from our house,” his mother, Sara, wrote in a text. “He spent the whole day in tears because we kept hearing the shooting range and didn’t feel safe.”
That’s the contradiction of “the shooting range,” aka the Seattle Police Athletic Association (SPAA). It is a place in Tukwila, no less, in earshot of Rainier Beach, where Seattle police train so they can better protect residents like Micah and Sara McNally. Their brains know this, but their personal truth is dispensed by shattered hearts and overwrought nervous systems.
Schools are supposed to be safe places; however, two students from nearby Rainier Beach High School – Tyjon Stewart, 18, and Tra’Veiah Houfmuse, 17 – were gunned down on January 30. They were at a bus stop right in front of South Shore K-8, in broad daylight, as schools were letting out. Alan T. Sugiyama High School is on the opposite side of the community center, which is another haven for youth and seniors.
It’s difficult to live through that, and another flurry of local gun violence in April, and feel secure when the pop-pop-pop from the “shooting range” is the daily soundtrack in your gun-rattled neighborhood.
For kids like Micah McNally, SPAA is the veritable monster under the bed – not seen, only heard, and maybe all the more terrifying for questions it raises in minds still under development.
“Having to constantly differentiate between real danger and the shooting range is exhausting for (my daughter) and for all of us, because these sounds are exactly the same, and our bodies and brains respond as if it is danger every time,” Liz Carley wrote in an email, referencing her young daughter, who attends after-school care at South Shore and had to wade through the crime scene on January 30.
A Rainier Beach resident, Carley volunteers for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and is an occupational therapist who has worked for mental health agencies, supporting youth who have experienced traumatic events.
“To put a community repeatedly traumatized by gun violence through this experience daily is the opposite of trauma-informed,” Carley wrote in an email to King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and King County Councilmember Rhonda Lewis. “It is triggering and retraumatizing to everyone who can hear it. Every day when I go to pick my 8-year-old daughter up from South Shore we can hear the shots. And every day I have to reassure her that those shots are not a danger to us.”
How all of this even happens is some sadistic trick of physics.
Hidden in plain sight, SPAA has been around since 1943 – much longer than almost every Rainier Beach resident it is impacting. Reaching it requires crossing into Tukwila at the top of the hill down South Ryan Way, over I-5 and past Boeing Field, then making an unmarked turn off a part of East Marginal Way that most of us never traverse. A squishy thoroughfare splits a pair of industrial buildings and a small sign announces, “Private Road Members Only.”
What members get is a sprawling piece of land, some owned by SPAA, some by the Seattle Police Department (SPD), and some leased by the City of Seattle and Seattle City Light. A modest pro shop with barred windows and doors sits in front of a grand lawn with a gazebo in one corner and a WWII canon in another. South of the shop is a pavilion, north up a kind of alley is a run of shooting ranges, and, in the back, beyond a small RV park, is Combat 3, for “police training only.”
All the ranges are outdoors and located about 2.5 miles from South Shore K-8. “We’re pretty far from Rainier Beach,” said Rich Pruitt, who works at the gun shop. What’s more, there are trees, a bustling freeway, a large hill, many single-family homes, and Kubota Garden between the SPAA ranges and my house in Rainier Beach. Yet, I still hear the unsettling salvos from down the way.
There are considerably more obstacles on the way to Seward Park, which is 4.5 miles from SPAA, and where residents say on social media that they’ve also heard firings from the range. Their caveat would be on gray and cloudy days. It’s a scientific fact that low-hanging clouds – ie., a typical Seattle day – can amplify and increase the distance of sounds.
Eddie Lin, District 2 Seattle City Councilmember, has also heard gunfire, likely from the SPAA range, when he has been in Rainier Beach. He has heard concerns from many of his constituents in the neighborhood, according to spokesperson Garrett Plescow Moore.
“The noise from SPAA is deeply concerning, given the retraumatizing effect it has on residents in South Seattle, especially young people and families who have lost loved ones to gun violence and refugees of conflict abroad,” Plescow Moore said via email.
Lin has huddled with County Councilmember Lewis, Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle, who is chair of the Public Safety Committee, and the SPD to determine what can be done, Plescow Moore added. “In short, there does not appear to be any legislative route the City of Seattle can take to address this issue given SPAA’s location in Tukwila,” he said. “However, we are working with SPD’s training lead to engage directly with the Seattle Police Athletic Association and explore noise barriers at the range. Similar measures have been used effectively at other shooting ranges.”
Noise barriers seem to be the most feasible, and reasonable, solution today, as well as in 2022. That was when Rainier Beach resident Mercedes McNeal wrote to then-Seattle City Councilmember Tammy Morales about the sound of gunfire from SPAA.
McNeal was particularly concerned about hearing gunfire at night, when essential workers like her “are just asking for peace when we come home after a long day.” McNeal sent me an audio file of gunfire sounds coming at about 9 p.m.
Having to hear the gunfire is “a slap in the face to our neighborhood that already deals with gun violence,” McNeal said in a message.
The responses that McNeal received were not very satisfying. The range’s “cease fire,” as is specified on its website, is 4:30 p.m. That seems to apply only to civilian users. The SPD told Katie Taylor, one of Morales’ community engagement coordinators, that it needed to use SPAA for rifle practice during evening hours in the winter so officers could have experience shooting in the dark. The SPAA also hosts a pistol league every Wednesday evening, starting at 5:45 p.m., from April 22 to June 3 and from August 19 to September 30.
The rub: Legally established firing ranges in Washington state are exempt from local noise ordinances. Tukwila defines the exemption as 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday, Sunday, and state-recognized holidays. Seattle’s “daytime” exemptions are 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., daily.
Part of the consequences of such timing is that gunfire is audible to young people during what is supposed to be their time for peace and quiet. “Sometimes when I go to sleep, I hear it, and it's scary,” Micah McNally said in an audio file sent by his mother.
The SPD said in 2022 that it ordered “some extra baffling in hopes this will help reduce the noise,” according to Taylor’s message to McNeal. Four years later, Pruitt at the gun shop said he doesn’t recall any baffling being installed. Inquiries about this topic were forwarded nearly three weeks ago to the SPD media unit, which hasn’t responded. Lin’s office reporting that it is exploring noise barriers with the SPD seems to indicate that the “extra baffling” probably was not ordered or installed in 2022.
SPAA is an 82-year-old, independent nonprofit with nearly $1.2 million in assets, according to its latest IRS filing (for 2025). It accepts vetted civilian members. But, to be clear, SPAA’s mission is “to provide athletic and entertainment opportunities to its membership, including operation of a gun range in conjunction with the Seattle Police Department.” The SPAA facilities are a key training ground for SPD, and it’s obviously in the best public interest that police officers handle firearms safely and effectively.
But what is an acceptable tradeoff?
At the place where Rainier Avenue South makes a big curve around the perimeter of the neighborhood, outside of the Safeway lot sits a brightly colored mural on the side of Rainier Beach Dental. It says, “Rainier Beach: A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth!”
Such a message would be a hard sell for the young daughter of Rainier Beach resident Liz Peterson. Just over a year ago, on May 1, 2025, the two were at Be’er Sheva Park with friends when someone fired randomly from a moving vehicle. Behind a log on the beach, Peterson and her friend lay their bodies over their children. Separately, a 76-year-old woman and a boy, 8 years old like Peterson’s daughter, were each grazed by a bullet. The Petersons and their friends, shaken and barefoot, safely scrambled to the nearby home of another friend.
Before the incident, her daughter never registered the gunfire from SPAA, Peterson said in an email. Afterward, she couldn’t not hear the sound. Over time, the young girl’s anxiety over the sound of distant gunfire improved but then came the Stewart and Houfmuse shootings at the bus stop in January.
Peterson heard the shots that day and sprinted around to the back of South Shore to fetch her daughter. As they were running around the building, they could hear gunfire from the range, which was distinguished by the young girl as occurring nearby. She yelled that they needed to hit the ground or be shot.
“Quite often we hear gunshots from the range in the afternoon during school pick-up time,” Peterson said. “There are so many of us that have been traumatized by gun violence and hearing those sounds all the time heightens our fear. …
“We don’t go to our parks anymore. We used to go to Pritchard Beach multiple times a week. This is the only home my daughter has known, and she wants to move. We shouldn’t have to wonder if the sounds we’re hearing are a nearby threat or from the range … sometimes it’s both at the same time.”
A place can also be two things at the same time – necessary and extraneous, terrifying and practical, authorized and violating. This particular place, the ranges at SPAA, must be reconciled through compromise on the timing of usage, when young ears and minds are less vulnerable, and better concealment of its disquieting disturbance. For the sake of a neighborhood’s sanity and its future, we must prioritize equilibrium over entitlement.
Glenn Nelson is a Japanese American journalist and lifetime South Seattle resident who founded The Trail Posse and has won numerous national and regional awards, including for the Emerald, for his writings about race.
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