Las Vegas Sun

February 23, 2021

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Foreign tourists take their shot at gun ranges

Three Irish men stood in a narrow alley on Tropicana Avenue, clutching machine guns and smiling through full automatic fire - 600 rounds a minute, clear through the target's face.

The noise could bust eardrums, this sound of three tourists, relaxing.

"I find it quite therapeutic," one of the men, Lee Tedstone of County Donegal, Ireland, said of firing his first Uzi. "It's a relief."

Tedstone and his friends are among hundreds of tourists lured to Las Vegas gun ranges every month by the promise a brief thrill with a weapon that's verboten abroad and hard to come by in the United States.

Tourists, armed with machine guns, line up to mock-massacre paper targets of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein - near life-size images doctored so the international villains make eye contact from across the range.

For foreigners, there's another thrill that comes from firing a gun illegal in your hometown and feared in your homeland. It's a shot at emulating a movie, bad guy or good.

"It's a bit of an adrenaline rush," Tedstone said.

Catering to tourists means making machine guns friendly. Customers who know nothing about automatic weapons find gracious gun store employees breathing down their barrels, straightening their aim and their safety goggles.

But it seems the tiniest trigger fingers need the least assistance. Children come to gun ranges knowing every weapon on the wall, fully versed in the firearm lexicon, all of which they learned from video games, said Michael Morrissey, co-owner of the Las Vegas Gun Range & Firearms Center on Blue Diamond Road.

Outside the Firearms Center, visitors are greeted with a sign that says "Practical to Tactical." Inside they find a machine gun buffet - Uzi, AK-47, Al Capone Tommy Gun, World War II-era Grease Gun, a 9 mm submachine gun called the Swedish K and favored by Green Berets in the Vietnam War.

Interested parties can fire any flavor of assault rifle for $50 at the Firearms Center. The price includes two loaded magazines that are used up in seconds. The short-lived gratification is part of the gun range romance: There's something, for some, in clinging onto a deadly speed.

"You're probably behind that gun for ten seconds" Morrissey said. "But that's the whole point of a machine gun."

For an extra $15, a customer can fire holes into a novelty T-shirt and wear it home, ballistically ventilated. For $200, customers can purchase the, "I blew stuff up and got a free hat" package: a four-machine gun deal with enough ammo for at least 20 minutes and a baseball cap to broadcast machine gun insider status forever.

Oregon college student Steve Dunmier went to a different range, the Gun Store on Tropicana Avenue, to shoot a M249 SAW, a fully automatic weapon so large that it requires a tri-pod stabilizer and fires belt-fed bullets. Dunmier paid $40 for the 30-second privilege, and he had himself filmed in the process. Spending spring break in a town where he can't legally drink or gamble, the 20-year-old might need something to show his friends back home.

"It's worth it if you've never done it before," Dunmier said, playing the digital video back for an audience.

Automatic weapons are illegal in Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan and several European countries - the same places that generate the majority of Las Vegas' international tourism. At the Firearms Center, translators make customers more comfortable by speaking to them in Mandarin, Chinese, Taiwanese or Spanish.

American Shooters Supply and Gun Club, Las Vegas' largest indoor range, is a regular stop for Oriental Tours, a local company that caters to the Pacific Rim crowd.

Oriental Tours runs trips to the Grand Canyon and gives tourists the option of ending their day with machine guns. Customers request a stop at American Shooters five to 10 times a month, tour operator Paul Cheng said.

Even in the United States, where automatic weapons are legal in 40 states, getting your hands on a machine gun is complicated and costly - Uzi's can start at $6,000, more limited machine guns easily grace five figures, said Robert Dowlet, an attorney for the National Rifle Association.

To entice tourists out of casinos, range owners do more than offer guns and bullets. Firearms Center clients are invited to relax in the store's lounge, which is decorated with free-standing elephant tusks and animal print. Off the range, employees shoot photos of customers snuggling and smiling with fresh-fired weapons.

"It's a little less gun guy and a little more customer service," said Morrissey, who left a job in hotel hospitality to pursue his dream of owning a gun range.

The Firearms Center has been open less than two years and already tourists account for half of the 200 customers who visit in a typical week.

The Gun Store hosts several hundred clients on the range every week, roughly 70 percent of whom are tourists they target with advertising techniques that, for competitive reasons, co-owner Chris Irwin didn't want to reveal.

Iowa tourist Dustin Schwers spotted a Gun Store billboard posted at McCarran International Airport and dragged his entire family to the range. Dustin, age 10, shot his first gun there, directing several bullets straight through Saddam's head.

Eating ice cream afterward, Dustin chalked up his beginner's accuracy to video game acumen.

The development of shooting ranges as tourist attractions is not exclusive to Las Vegas. Ranges across the country are trying to lure vacationers, touting the range as a place for an enjoyable family outing, said Bill Brassard, communications director for the National Association of Shooting Ranges.

But soon, merely giving them guns to fire may seem bland.

At the Clark County Shooting Park, a 2,900-acre compound being built in North Las Vegas with $57.8 million in revenue from state land sales, tourists will be invited to dress up in either Western wear or 1920s-inspired clothing, and have pictures taken with their era-appropriate weapons before firing them, Shooting Park Manager Don Turner said.

The Shooting Park, scheduled to open in 2007, will be North America's largest, Turner said. The themed range may include a barbecue, served by costumed attendants to tourists expected to have little, if any, experience with high-caliber firearms.

And it's the singular experience of firing a machine gun that brought Canadian newlyweds Marc and Angelique Cioffi to the firing range on their Las Vegas honeymoon. Marc Cioffi, a Canadian police officer, wanted to share a love of automatic weapons with the love of his life.

Angelique Cioffi indulged her husband's request and tried out an AK-47, knowing, perhaps, that a machine gun grudgingly shot would happen but once in Las Vegas and never again at home.

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