Gun ranges are all over the country, but what goes on behind the scenes? A former gun range worker told Mother Jones his real life stories from his days on the job, and they are, quite frankly, horrifying.
‘The Gun Industry Is Really Changing For The Worse’
Kyle Taylor* worked at many gun ranges over the years. His attraction to guns began in his teenage years, after violence hit close to home. As he told Mother Jones:
“I was attracted to guns as a teenager because my family had been victims of violent crime. My dad had been mugged and my family has been held up in their store at least a couple of times at gunpoint. I guess you could say it’s a way of reclaiming some sense of power over a powerless situation.”
This attraction led to gun purchases, then more purchases, then, eventually, a job at a gun range. As Kyle says:
“I later worked as a contractor at ranges all over the region. I’ve seen a lot … The general vibe at the ranges has gotten much more extreme and paranoid … The gun industry is really changing for the worse.”
Kyle is right. It is patently obvious that the gun industry and the NRA have gone off the rails. The NRA was not always the insane, no-gun-control-ever-for-any-reason group that we see today. As Alternet wrote in 2013 in its history of the NRA:
“It was not until 1977 when the NRA that Americans know today emerged, after libertarians who equated owning a gun with the epitome of freedom and fomented widespread distrust against government—if not armed insurrection—emerged after staging a hostile leadership coup.”
The Range Paid A Service To Clean Up The Bodies
Kyle’s stories include several mentions of suicides at the shooting ranges:
“The ranges make a lot of their money from renting guns to people—those are the people you really have to watch out for. Like the time we rented a Ruger handgun to this woman. After I turned my back to her, she put the gun behind her ear and blew a nice, clean, round hole through the center of her head.”
According to Kyle, the workers had to clean it up. At least in the beginning:
“Eventually the range started paying a service to come pick up the bodies and scrub everything. But before that happened, Christ, what was it? Bleach and kitty litter. I remember one time I had come in for a shift change and there was a pool of blood. We didn’t have any bleach but we did have some kitty litter. I remember using that to soak up the blood. And because we didn’t have the bleach, some of my members were kind enough to go across the street to the grocery store and buy some.”
The woman above wasn’t the only suicide he witnessed, either. It was just a part of the job.
Three Mass Shooters Practiced Right In Front Of Him
Of course, the people coming into the gun ranges aren’t just there to shoot the target (or themselves). Some are there to get real life practice for a rampage:
“Around 2002, a middle-aged guy named Hesham Hadayet came into the range … I think he came in two or three more times. I didn’t pay any attention to it. Well, a few months later, I turn on the TV and I see this guy’s face. He’d shot up a ticket counter at LAX. He killed two people and injured two more before being fatally shot by a security guard.
The second guy, Phong Thuc Tran, also shot at the range. He worked for the gas company and had been forced to resign. After he killed his supervisor and his co-worker, he was running around for like a day or two before he parked his car in front of a police station. That’s where he shot himself. We only found out about it when the local cops walked in. The guy, he was a little off, but he was very quiet, respectful. No outward signs of anger. You never would’ve known.
The third one, Scott Dekraai, practiced at the range in 2011 and after that he goes on a shooting rampage. He shot nine people at the Salon Meritage hair salon in Seal Beach, including his ex-wife. Only one of them survived.”
Presidents As Targets And General Paranoia
I was a sophomore in high school when Bill Clinton was elected, and, at the time, I didn’t pay all that much attention to politics. I certainly didn’t pay attention to gun culture. To me, it seemed like the crazy really started coming out in 2008, only to reach a fever pitch in 2010, with the rise of the Tea Party. While that is true to an extent, the vibe really started changing in the 1990s, according to Kyle:
“I started noticing a difference in the type of people coming to the range when Bill Clinton was president. It was the first time I had actually seen somebody post a picture of the president as a target. I told them, ‘Look, you can’t do that.’ Now there’s a company that sells targets with images of Obama, and they put apelike features on him. You never would have seen something like that 20 years ago when I started.”
Kyle also talks about the “preppers” who frequented the ranges at which he worked and noted the underlying current of paranoia among these folks. It’s one of the many reasons Kyle chose to leave the industry:
“It all plays into people’s paranoid fantasies, and guns are always the solution. They give people a sense of control in a world that is out of control …
I’m leaving the industry to make better money. Dude, I will still be into guns. I like working on ’em. My friends and I still shoot. But the other motivation, just as strong perhaps, is that I don’t want to have to be around a bunch of crazy people.”
There is a difference between being into guns, and being into full-on gun culture. There is a difference between someone who enjoys shooting and someone who is a gun nut. Unfortunately, we live in a society with far too many of the latter. And those are the “crazy people” of whom Kyle speaks.
Speaking of gun nuts, watch Thom Hartmann destroy one who called into his show shortly after the Umpqua Community College shooting in October, 2015:
*Name changed per Mother Jones
Featured Image by Brandon Dimcheff via Flickr under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license
