From about a third mile away. I was working late as maintenance/technician at a small state of the art digital recording studio and the sound engineer had gone out to the parking lot to smoke a cigarette. He came back in, kinda shaken up, and said we should come outside for a minute. There was serious gunfire going on, "right over there", several different calibers, including some fully automatic weapons. We listened for just a few minutes, until someone said, "Maybe we should go back inside". Oh, yeah! We found out the next day that there had been a "turf battle" between the Jamaican Mafia and some Mexican Drug gang. The police reported over 200 casings found. Pretty scary, indeed.
That was fairly typical of some parts of Houston in the 80's.