EVERETT – About 6 p.m. Tuesday, Penny Peters, 52, stood in her living room, her fingers pressed to her temples, her face flushed, eyes shut tight.

“I’m pretty shaky right now,” she said as the sound of gunfire popped around her. “It’s just been constant all day.”

Several hundred feet away, just beyond a narrow swath of forest and downhill from Penny Peters’ Federal Avenue home, Everett police officers were aiming handguns, rifles and other weapons at paper adversaries at the city’s outdoor police gun range.

“You perform the way you train, and we train to live,” said Jerry Burke, a deputy police chief.

But Penny Peters and her husband, Pete, 53, wish the police would take their training elsewhere. They say they’ve suffered hearing loss in the eight months they’ve lived there.

“The old term for it is shell shock,” Pete Peters said.

Pete Peters took his complaint to the City Council, and the city responded Tuesday by adding the range to a yearlong facility study to determine whether it should be moved or altered.

Council President Marian Krell lives in the Forest Preserve, a housing development uphill from the range. She said the council hears complaints about the range every few years, and with good reason. The sound, she said, is “like the Fourth of July – only worse.”

“The range has been there forever, but the weapons have changed,” she said. “The types of guns they are using are a lot more disruptive than the old ‘pop, pop, pop.’ “

Any change would be expensive, Krell said, with estimates ranging from $1.5 million to cover the existing range to up to $3 million to build elsewhere.

The current range is ideal, Burke said. Other sites such the practice range at Sam’s Gun Shop on Airport Road aren’t adequate for long-term, dynamic training.

Home buyers were warned about the range when they purchased homes in the Forest Preserve, city spokeswoman Kate Reardon said.

The range, built in the 1940s, was once open seven days a week. When the Forest Preserve was developed, the department volunteered to train just twice a week, said Jim Seaman, a deputy chief. In the late 1990s, the department settled for just one day – Tuesdays – after neighbors complained.

Each of Everett’s 181 officers tests at the range four times a year in an exercise that takes about 10 minutes, Burke said. The first Thursday of each month is an in-service day at the range.

Law enforcement officers from outside Everett also use the range on a limited basis.

All told, Burke said, it’s open 76 days a year.

“They don’t get the training we’d like them to get,” he said, adding that’s because the police department wants to be a good neighbor.

And it is, some residents say. Decibel readings taken in the Forest Preserve with a hand-held meter showed noise peaks between 50 and 60 decibels during periods of gunfire.

Dan Barstad, 47, has lived on 41st Place in the Forest Preserve for more than six years. He said the shooting is usually limited to Tuesdays and rarely lasts past 5 p.m.

“We hear it, but it’s not a big deal to us,” he said.

Across the street, Sue Wolfe, 57, said the sound is almost comforting. It reminds her that police officers are nearby.

At the Forest Park playground, where the noise ranged from 50 decibels to 60 decibels, children ignored the gunfire, but some adults were concerned.

“At first, I thought it was fireworks,” Judy Berry, 63, of Everett said as her grandson ran in the playground. “The alarms were going off on cars.”

The Peters say they’ve measured the noise level at up to 100 decibels on a meter they use inside their home.

Sergei Kochkin, executive director of the Better Hearing Institute in Alexandria, Va., said gunfire is a damaging sound, whether at 60 or 100 decibels.

“It’s psychologically startling,” he said. “It’s the on and off startle that’s dangerous, because your body’s always in a startle situation.”

* Some nearby residents say they don’t mind the noise, but others say their hearing suffers.