Gubs for grownups

The New York Times has a video (above) about gubs and an article by Julie Turkewitz:

At a gun club in Centennial, Colorado, a Denver suburb, Marc Rabinoff sat in the VIP lounge, amid a sea of leather couches, the fireplace at his back. The air smelled vaguely of perfume. At an adjacent range, his wife, Diana, fired bullets from her purple glitter pistol, her hands wrapped in gloves of leather and lace.
The Rabinoffs paid a ten thousand dollar initiation fee for their membership in the Centennial Gun Club, an impressive 35,000-square-foot complex that opened in 2013. With its spa-style locker rooms, sunny cigar patio, and bouquet-lined lobby, Centennial is part a wave of luxury gun clubs popping up in and around urban centers, modeled after country clubs. With shooting ranges instead of golf courses, these so-called guntry clubs are billed as oases of leisure in a market for shooting enthusiasts that is saturated with dingy, badly ventilated facilities nestled in uninspiring strip malls.
These new clubs host art events, as well as cocktail parties after time on the range, enticing people who might never have visited more utilitarian firing ranges: women, city dwellers and people who did not grow up in gun-owning households. The Rabinoffs are a case in point; he is a forensics consultant originally from the South Bronx, who did not own a gun until two years ago.
“We’re trying to create an environment where the captains of industry are proud to bring their clients,” said Richard Abramson, 66, Centennial’s principal owner.
Centennial has 28 lanes for shooting at targets, a tiered membership plan, and a neatly organized gun-and-gear shop, replete with glass cases and friendly attendants, that calls to mind a suburban Nordstrom. Though it may look like just another nice store, it is heavily staffed with safety officers, and Abramson emphasizes training for employees, members, and visitors, hosting safety events that draw hundreds.
In the more austere clubs around this state, visitors may pay a hundred-dollar membership fee at the outset. At Centennial, couples pay five hundred dollars to join. V.IP members like the Rabinoffs, who pay more, are called Statesmen: they shoot in private lanes with extra-wide berths, and relax in their own lounge, outfitted with a gleaming cafe. An iris-scan is necessary for access.
“I feel very special when I’m here,” said Rabinoff, a former professor of sports performance who now travels the country to testify as an expert witness on sports injuries. When he is not away on business— attending to a trampoline case, say, or a gymnastics lawsuit— he spends time here in the lounge, reading depositions by the fire.
Two years ago, Rabinoff feared guns. Then he retired from his teaching position, and his wife, also a nonshooter, suggested they seek out a shared hobby. Soon they found Centennial.
On a recent afternoon, Mrs. Rabinoff, 61, walked confidently off the range, carrying her violet pistol, her lipstick in place. The couple had tried other shooting facilities, but found them unappealing. “Just dirty; the door is dirty, everything is dirty, when you leave there, you feel dirty,” Mrs. Rabinoff said. “If we were members of another club, I wouldn’t be shooting,” she said.
High-end shooting clubs are themselves not new. Orvis Sandanona, a sprawling facility about eighty miles north of New York City that caters to the tastes of its elite East Coast clients, is just one of several clubs with a lofty pedigree. Founded in 1907, it has a rustic lodge, fields for pheasant hunting, membership fees over three thousand dollars, and an option to join club-organized safaris. It is owned by the Orvis Company, the sportswear retailer.
Although this sort of rural, outdoor shooting club has been in existence for more than a century, the current wave of high-end shooting clubs is different. They are located indoors, in or near urban centers, and seek a broader range of customers; notably, upwardly mobile tech industry professionals, bankers, and mothers who might otherwise have joined tennis or golf clubs.
“The whole model has been reinvented,” said Zach Snow, a manager for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry group. In the past decade or so, he said, luxury clubs have popped up near cities in Virginia, Texas, and elsewhere. There are now about fifty clubs in the association’s “five-star family”, an elite group granted the rating only after a 585-point inspection; the number has grown since the rating was created more than a decade ago. The new facilities are a response to growing interest in the sport, particularly among non-shooters, Snow said.
In some clubs, owners are promoting not just their facilities, but also expansive libraries of automatic firearms available for rent to both members and nonmembers. In Arizona, the Scottsdale Gun Club, founded in 2004, is heralded as the standard by many in the industry. Its six thousand members include some of the wealthiest people in the state as well as several professional athletes. The highest tiered members pay five thousand dollars to start.
The club’s MGAs — an insider’s acronym for Machine Gun Adventures— are a major selling point, allowing members to choose from at least twenty types of automatic firearms. “It’s almost like a grown man’s candy store,” said Walter Abrams, 39, a sales manager at the club. “There’s not much we don’t have.”
After a few hours on the range, VIP members can retire to the Titanium Lounge, which has comfortable couches and busy attendants. “We have a couple of MLB guys that treat this place like ‘Cheers,’ ” said Abrams, referring to the club’s Major League Baseball contingent. Despite the crackle of gunfire, there is a restful atmosphere. “One of the biggest things is tranquillity,” he said. “It’s a privacy area.”
While some people may bristle at the idea of marketing machines guns as high-end toys, several groups that favor tighter gun restrictions said they were not opposed to clubs that offer such adventures, but they do want the government to regulate the clubs to require background checks for members and visitors, and age restrictions. (Few states restrict children from shooting automatic firearms at ranges, and in August of 2014, a nine-year-old girl at a family-oriented recreational range in Arizona accidentally shot and killed her instructor with an Uzi submachine gun.)
“We’re concerned about the lack of regulation,” said Lindsey Zwicker, a lawyer at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which has its headquarters in San Francisco, California. “We don’t really focus on the marketing aspect.”
For some gun clubs, sleeker styling and upmarket appeal have helped ease their acceptance in communities that were initially resistant. When Lock and Load, a fourteen-thousand-square-foot facility with Warhol-style wall art, opened in Miami, Florida’s hip Wynwood district in 2013, local gun opponents seemed won over by the range’s eco-friendly policies, said Javier Lopez, 24, a co-owner of the club. People also liked the sophisticated parties that Lock and Load hosted during the area’s marquee art festival, Art Basel. “Once they saw how we operate, it really eased up,” Lopez said. The shooting range has even become a popular lunch-break spot for members, as well as professionals who work in the financial district nearby, Lopez said. “It’s ultimately for thrills,” said Lopez, who said the management banned discussion of gun policy by the club. “It’s such a politically charged topic. We don’t want to get involved. We just want people to come in and have a good time.”

Rico says the one locally isn't nearly as fancy...