After a year and a half of talks, the board had every reason to think that it had successfully negotiated a truce between the Upper Valley Fish and Game Club and its neighbors.

In February, the board ratified a new 10-year agreement that gave the club use of 57 acres of town-owned land off Five Corners Road for $1 a year. In exchange, neighbors received assurances that gun enthusiasts using high-powered, rapid-firing weapons wouldn’t have carte blanche access to public land the private club has enjoyed for the last 40 years.

For club members, however, the proposed agreement apparently had the feel of a shotgun wedding.

“I just felt negotiations ended before they were truly finished,” said David Goodrich, the club’s president.

Hoping to keep the peace in town, the Selectboard agreed to hear the club out. But after consulting with the town’s attorney, board Chairman Stuart Rogers wisely denied the club’s request for a closed-door meeting. Any discussions about the use of public property need to occur in public view.

On Monday night, the club asked the board to reconsider limits on the number of shooting days. The club was willing to give up a couple of Saturdays a month in exchange for two Sundays.

“Sunday is the only time some members have to get out to the range,” Goodrich said.

Saturday versus Sunday?

I’m not sure it makes a big difference. For the shooting range’s neighbors, it’s pick your poison.

So I can see the Selectboard going along with the request.

But the club also thinks it’s unfair for the agreement to ban weapons of .50-caliber or larger and keep shooters from firing more than one round per second.

This is where the club loses me.

Forget the noise. (Easy for me to do, since I don’t live near the shooting range.) I’m talking more about the current gun culture. Too many people have bought into the NRA propaganda that everyone has a constitutional right to walk down main street with a bazooka on their shoulder and a 9 mm pistol strapped to their waist.

Since when did Thetford become a Special Forces base?

When the Upper Valley Fish and Game Club was started 40 years ago, the shooting range was a safe haven in a remote part of town where hunters could sight-in their rifles before deer season.

Back then, no one had semi-automatic assault rifles in their gun cabinets.

The AR-15 is all the rage now, and fast and furious is what today’s shooting ranges are about. In Sunday’s paper, staff writer Jordan Cuddemi wrote about the Enfield Outing Club’s shooting range, which now offers classes in armed self-defense.

It’s bad enough that police all too often take a shoot-to-kill approach in dealing with suspects, but now soccer moms are being trained in hair-trigger tactics.

At Monday’s Thetford Selectboard meeting, a half dozen or so gun club members sat in a corner of the room.

I felt a bit sorry for them. They struck me as well-intentioned old-timers who are trying to preserve a club that might have outlived its original purpose, although its annual kids’ fishing derby is a wonderful tradition worthy of community support.

The club has also shown a willingness to compromise on some issues. Under the proposed agreement, it will no longer allow the Vermont State Police and municipal police departments (other than Thetford’s) to hold training sessions at the shooting range in which hundreds of rounds are fired.

“That’s mostly what the neighbors have been hearing,” said club member Bill Huff.

Maybe.

But I still have to think there’s a lot more noise coming out of the range than there was 20 years ago. Mostly gone are the days when people got together for target practice with their .22-caliber rifles or friendly skeet shooting competition.

That leaves the club’s older members to carry water for a silent majority (at least until they pull the trigger) that gets a rush by firing powerful weapons that were once reserved for blood-stained battlefields, and should still be.

Club members who can’t resist showing off the firepower of their fully automatic rifles on Sunday afternoons should stick to video games. Or better yet, join the Army.

I came to think this way after learning last year that the NRA was paying Martha Dean, a Connecticut attorney who grew up in Norwich, to represent the gun club in its dealings with the town.

If nothing else, accepting the NRA’s free legal help was an ill-advised PR move. It gave ammunition, so to speak, to the argument that the club had lost its bearings in recent years. (The Selectboard has used $5,800 of taxpayers’ money to pay for legal advice during the negotiations, which tells me they were conducted in good faith by the town.)

As its name suggests, the Upper Valley Fish and Game Club has always included members from beyond Thetford. But Goodrich told me that I shouldn’t presume the club has been overtaken by NRA die-hards in recent years. Many people who enjoy rapid-fire shooting see it as a challenging sport. Keeping the barrel steady while firing round after round at a stationary target takes skill, Goodrich said.

Would I be likely to find him rapid-firing a semi-automatic assault rifle on a regular basis at the range?

“Probably not,” he said.

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.