Paul is an affable retired orthodontist who, between firing rounds from his .45, is conscientious enough to sweep up the spent shell casings that have accumulated around his lane at Bill’s Gun Range in Robbinsdale. Two lanes down, a couple of bumbling boys just out of their teens, “first-time shooters,” as Paul describes them affectionately, have been inquiring of his expertise. “Should we shoot with one hand or both?”
“Uh, most people shoot with two,” Paul answers with minimal concern. One of the boys points the gun downrange, at a portrait of Osama bin Laden. Paul watches as he misses the target almost entirely and asks, “Mind if I shoot his eyes out?” The boy agrees and Paul, in an impressive display of marksmanship, takes out bin Laden’s eyes from 21 feet away.
Bill’s Gun Range is located in a strip mall, sharing the building with the Institute for Athletic Medicine and a U.S. Bank branch. Customers arrive in a barren fluorescent lobby with matted carpet, vending machines, and a television tuned to KTCA. A row of windows faces 16 shooting lanes, and the muffled sound of gunshots thumps beneath the conversation. Victoria, a tough-talking blonde in her mid-40s, presides, exercising an authority that tends to correct even the slightest deviation from what she terms “my range rules.” When I ask her if there are ever problems between shooters, she just smiles. “Lots of guns here, so everybody kind of behaves.”
Bill Penney, the 73-year-old owner and patriarch of the range, breaks down “everybody” as follows: gang members (“We make them toe the mark. If their pupils are wide, we send them home”), “Let’s-have-a-blast” customers (“First-timers trying to impress their dates with big guns”), dedicated shooters (“Guys who join leagues”), private security officers (“We set up accounts with companies for training”), bounty hunters (“One guy looks like Joe Pesci”), police officers, hunters, and those simply interested in self-defense.
Penney himself does not fit into any of his own categories. He is a retired Ph.D. chemical engineer with an impressive portfolio of patents. He enjoys target shooting and some hunting, but actually owns “few guns” personally. Same for Victoria, who claims to be “the oddity around here” because she only owns two guns and self-identifies as “just a mom who loves her job.”
Though Penney won’t divulge his profitability, he concedes that he runs “a good business.” It sure seems lucrative: Lane fees are $20 for a single shooter, $30 for a pair; gun rentals start at $15; traditional targets, as well as those with pictures of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, are available for $2; ammunition starts at $5 for a box of 50 bullets. And the range sells lots of bullets. “Last year,” Penney tells me, “we recycled about twenty tons of lead.”
It’s mid-afternoon when I ask a young and affluent-looking couple if they’d be willing to talk to me. They happily oblige on the condition that they not have to divulge their names. I learn that they live on Lake of the Isles, that she’s “in marketing,” and that he’s a former musician and current photographer. A native of Kentucky, he did some sport-shooting in his youth and still enjoys indulging the interest on occasion. Today’s occasion is an antique .44 Auto Mag that he “spent a fortune” buying at a gun auction. “It’s never been fired,” he announces, and after several furtive attempts, it stays that way. The couple has more success with a .380 automatic that she self-consciously describes as having “nice lines.”
While chatting we are interrupted by a massive blast that resonates painfully through my ear protection (ear muffs allow conversational frequencies while excluding most “high-decibel events”). Everyone turns to lane seven where a middle-aged man has just fired something with a nine-and-a-half-inch barrel. I approach carefully.
“Four-eighty Ruger,” he announces before firing five rounds at yet another photo of Osama bin Laden. When I ask what he does for a living, he laughs. “Oh, I run a detox center.”
A few minutes later Paul is taking aim at his own targets when he notices a young black kid in warm-up pants, a black T-shirt, and an Oakland Raiders cap, misfiring his Glock. Paul strolls over to the younger man who, under ordinary circumstances, would be unlikely to take an interest in a 60-ish white man who used to straighten teeth in the Sons of Norway building. But the younger man seems to recognize a valuable level of expertise in the older man, and he pays careful attention as Paul demonstrates proper aiming technique. “I like to help out,” Paul tells me later, as he relaxes in the lobby with a cigar. I look out on the range and see that the younger man has benefited from the tutorial: his shots have become much more accurate. “That’s just part of the fun of coming down here,” says Paul.
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