Monday, March 24, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
For Steve Carmichael, life is a trapshoot. Pull! "I won seven North American trapshooting championships," he says. Pull! "We're looking for every opportunity to show shooting firearms as fun and recreational." Pull! "We'll go through about 3 million targets this year."
It's one of the eight or 10 genuinely spring-like days Southern Nevada is allotted each year, and the Las Vegas Gun Club's trap fields are busy for a weekday. Green clay pigeons fall by the flock as the shooters go through their robotic routine: pull, boom, boom, reload; pull, boom, boom, reload.
At first glance, they seem mostly of a type, what you'd imagine to be your typical shotgun gentry: solid, paunchy white guys wearing caps, steady against the whomp of their full-choke 12-gauges. But look closer; there are several women, too, and some minorities. In the club's restaurant, a roomy place with a bear hide hanging by the Coke machine and Fruitopia cooler, a handful of oldsters are shooting the bull instead of targets.
Carmichael, the club's leaseholder and boss of the place, is in there, too, trying to put away a ham sandwich and a bowl of broccoli soup under the dead gaze of the wallful of antlered mammal heads that seems to be standard decor wherever shooters gather. He's not getting much lunch down. "Hold on, there's someone I have to talk to," he says, scooting off again. Other people bring their questions and concerns to his table.
Through the window to his left you can see the pull, boom, boom, reload and watch another 4-inch disk of pitch and limestone become a puff of dust and falling shards, adding to the bright green crust that coats the ground starting about 30 yards from the shooting station.
"You don't want to just shatter 'em," he says, back at his sandwich after another lunchus interruptus, "you want to smoke 'em! And when you do smoke 'em, there's a very strong psychological reward," a visceral shiver, a nervy thrill that for some supersedes their hit-miss tally. Pull, boom, boom, reload!
The Las Vegas Gun Club sits near Floyd Lamb State Park, on 65 acres leased from the state parks people. It has 30 trap fields, and, sorry handgunners, it's not the place to sight in your .357 mag; nothing but shotguns allowed.
It's set up something like a golf course. Members buy target disks and pay to use the course (nonmembers are welcome but pay a little more). Along with the restaurant there's a bar, a pro shop, league shooting, a dozen employees and a lively social scene.
"It's one of the finer clubs," says member Ron Sells, who, coincidentally, is in the "Shooter Spotlight" in this month's club newsletter.
"It's run extremely well. Steve Carmichael is probably one of the finer gun-club operators you'll run across."
Carmichael's been in charge since he bought out the previous leaseholder in 1989. Around since the mid-'50s, the club had seen better days. Carmichael, in fact, had witnessed some of them; he started coming to Vegas to shoot in tournaments in 1968. Later, he ran a successful gun club in Anchorage, Alaska, which is why the previous LVGC leasee, having trouble keeping the facility going, asked Carmichael to take over.
"His price was so high I wasn't interested," Carmichael says. "What happened was, over the course of a year, he dropped his price so much I was interested."
Carmichael's tenure has seen the club grow; the first big tournament under his hand attracted about 300 shooters; the most recent, in February, drew more than 800 shotgunners, who blasted through half a million targets. The field would have topped 1,000, he says, if not for the lousy weather. "We have one of the best reputations in the business," he says.
Along with two international tournaments a year, in February and September, and a welter of state, local and club competitions, the club hosts popular weekly leagues. Fifty teams -- about 250 shooters -- compete every Wednesday night. There is also a little league for short shooters ages 7-17.
"We got 15 .410 shotguns, the lightest you can get, and got the stocks cut" to make them kid-friendly. Forty-eight youths now participate. In the offing: parent-child leagues, starting April 10. "We're the only club in the country, I'm sure, that's doing that."
The social angle is as important as the shooting; gun people are notoriously gregarious. "I tell (shooters forming league teams), 'Don't look for good shooters, look for someone who wants to come out and shoot with you,'" Carmichael says.
Says Sells, "It seems that the caliber of people attracted to a gun club are good, sociable people."
All he could be
Growing up in Missouri, Carmichael was familiar with guns and gun culture at an early age, hunting with a shotgun before he reached double digits. "I started shooting trap when I was 11 or 12 years old. My dad did it, and he got me started."
He was good right away; Carmichael won the 1962 Missouri state tournament in his age group. It was the third contest he'd entered. Early success kept him active; by his junior year in high school, an Army officer who saw him shoot at a tournament in Ohio encouraged Carmichael to join the Army and its trapshooting team. He'd planned to go right to college, but...
"All the time I was in school ... he'd planted a seed. I started thinking that maybe I could make the team, shoot in the military. ... By the summer of '67, I'd pretty well decided I didn't want to go straight to college."
He joined the Army. The shooting team traveled around Europe -- this was at the height of the Vietnam War, remember -- as Army ambassadors, showing a different side of the military than what was being displayed in the jungles of southeast Asia. Team members had an extra incentive to aim well, Carmichael says. Shoddy shooters could be dumped from the team and into the rice paddies. "We never lost in 83 tournaments," he says.
Shooting for the pros
After the military, he majored in zoology and minored in chemistry at the University of Missouri, thinking he might be a veterinarian. Instead, upon graduation, he put that knowledge to use by becoming a professional trapshooter.
"From May of '75 to April of '82, I made my living shooting trap," he recalls. Ah, the good old days! Based mostly in Kansas City, he'd go to 30 or 40 tournaments a year, shoot down as much prize money as he could, and move on.
In his mind, desire equals trapshooting success. "A lot of people have the eye-hand coordination, but a lot of people haven't learned to win," he says. Outside, a shooter's T-shirt testifies to the sport's futility factor: "Pull, Bang, S---." "I learned to win early on, and I always wanted to win."
His national titles include junior champion in 1966, men's doubles and all-around honors in 1974, men's single and all-around titles in 1975 and all-around champion in 1980.
In March 1982, he met some Alaskans while shooting at a tournament in Vegas, an encounter that eventually led to an offer to Carmichael to help revive a flagging gun club in Anchorage.
"It just seemed like a time in my life when I was ready for a change," he says. So he hung up his gun and went into gun management, staying in Alaska for more than five years before dropping oil prices decimated the Anchorage club and sent him packing south.
He doesn't put shotgun to shoulder much these days, maybe the occasional tournament here and there to keep his trigger finger working. "Hardly at all," he says. He's too busy running the club. You'd expect him to be wistful about that, longing for the thump and puff of the competitive shoot, the pull, boom, boom, reload. He does miss it, a little. But he doesn't sentimentalize it.
"I can actually say I love my business," he says. For one thing, it gives his scattered shotgunning friends a reason to visit. "It brings my friends to me," he says. "I don't have to travel much anymore." But he does have to trot off again. "This place keeps me so busy," he says.
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