There's been a fair amount of news over the last few days about opposition among ranchers to the Army's plan to expand training in southern Colorado. The military needs the land to train for military operations, the ranchers are upset about losing land.
But Colorado resident Page Penk has another plan altogether: expand the range but limit it to only nonlethal weapons. Penk, described by the Colorado Springs Gazette as a "recently unemployed master’s degree candidate at the University of Colorado" appears to be acting alone in this quest. In either case, he's submitted a ballot initiative that would require the military to use the range to test only nonlethal weapons "such as lasers, malodorants and entangling foams and nets."
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“If it’s an alternative between not expanding Piñon Canyon or expanding Piñon Canyon for nonlethal weapons, the military is going to want to do the second one,” Penk said. *
He has not spoken with the Las Animas County residents who are fighting to keep the Army from expanding Fort Carson’s training site. Penk said he’d prefer that the ban on lethal weapons apply to the current Piñon Canyon area, but that it should be seen metaphorically as meaning all of southern Colorado.
He has not researched the constitutionality of what state Rep. Bob Gardner, a Colorado Springs Republican and an attorney, called an “absurd” measure. The state cannot tell the federal government how to conduct its constitutionally designated functions, Gardner said.
The submission of this ballot initiative — and of another one calling for the creation of a U.S. Department of Peace —comes slightly more than a month after Penk turned in a request for an initiative that would add the phrase “peace is possible” to Colorado’s guiding legal document.
Sadly, another problem with Penk's idea is that many of the nonlethal weapons he talks about haven't really been developed by the military (or at least not to the point of having fieldable weapons soldiers could train on).
