The "character" of gun clubs

B

benenglish

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In the competition benchrest forum, Jackie Schmidt posted:

jackie schmidt said:
..."large" ranges...are zoos.
...small membership is a big plus to shooters like Benchrest Shooters...
Click to expand...

That got me thinking about stuff that would have been way off-topic in that forum, so I've posted here. To wit:

Big clubs with lots of members and low fees can have good facilities and (maybe) the budget to maintain them. They need lots of ongoing maintenance because they have so many members who don't follow the rules and do bad things at ranges. We've all seen centerfire cases on the rimfire firing line. I've seen centerfire cases left behind at ranges where supposedly only rimfires are allowed, period. Some members would love to shoot at bottles, glass bottles, glass bottles filled with gasoline, etc.

To illustrate - I once built a temporary 25-meter rapid fire pistol range for a U.S. shooting team (you know, the guys who go to the Olympics) qualifying event. The morning after I built it, I arrived at the range to find a local shooter merrily shooting holes in the base of the aluminum target frame, right where the control cables pass through the $25K mechanism. His bullets were landing about 2 feet from where the compressed nitrogen tanks were installed. His attitude was that if it was between the berm and the firing line, he had a right to destroy it by blowing holes in it. After all, we wouldn't have left all that machinery on the range if we didn't want people to shoot at it, would we? (I threw the guy off the range, took his identifying info, and let the NRA seek compensation from the club for the damage. It was one of the few times in my life when I was seriously tempted to initiate physical violence.)

In short, when your club gets big enough, there will inevitably be a too-large number of slobs in the member population.

Small clubs (the post that started this up was talking about the Tomball club) can have good facilities specialized to the needs of their core members and not need as much maintenance budget because they don't have so many members who are yahoos and destroy things for the sheer joy of unbridled nihilism.

We have both in the Houston area.

What we don't have are any clubs that follow a model that's common in Europe - charge $5000 (or more) a year for membership, provide super-premium facilities (with full time staff, restaurants, etc.), and maintain zero tolerance for any members who don't respect the facilities or their fellow members.

There are legal and cultural reasons that such clubs are rare in the U.S. I don't know of any, certainly none in my area (Houston). The most expensive club I know of is $200 a month, plus a $7500 buy-in, for their most premium membership. I doubt that even that figure approaches what it would cost to run a truly professional club; the club I'm talking about is attached to a large retail facility and makes most of its money from retail sales.

Club business models are all over the place, clearly. Just as clearly, truly high-quality ranges are expensive to build. (The airgun range, by itself, cost over a million dollars to build for the Atlanta Olympics.)

So could a "premium club" concept fly?

What do y'all think? Would you be willing to pay a premium for membership to a club whose facilities and culture matched your needs perfectly? What would that ideal club provide, what would it look like, and how much would you be willing to pay?

Or, asked another way, what's the perfect gun club concept (in your opinion) and how much do you think members ought to be willing to pay if you got your perfect club up and running?

Just curious,

Ben
 
benenglish said:
What we don't have are any clubs that follow a model that's common in Europe - charge $5000 (or more) a year for membership,

Would you be willing to pay a premium for membership to a club whose facilities and culture matched your needs perfectly?
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Ben,

The clubs that I have belonged to have met my needs perfectly. One of my needs is not to pay $5000/year for a place to shoot. I prefer the American Model. I guess if I wanted to live like a European I would move to Europe. Are you listening Obama? That was a rhetorical question.

Greg
 
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From what I've seen in ten years of volunteering at local rifle ranges, high priced clubs wouldn't make it in Utah. Mormons are taught from birth to be "thrifty" which usually progresses into being "cheap" later in life. Most here would probably be willing to pay up to $50 a year for membership but at that "premium" price they would expect a lot.

Combine all that with near unlimited access to BLM land in Utah and people would simply go shoot in the desert if the local club got too expensive. That is already what most people do. Never hard to see where the more popular places are to shoot out in the boonies. Usually looks like a dump. TV's, stereos, propane bottles, couches, car doors, glass bottles, computer monitors, beer cans, etc. Really makes gun owners look good!
 
benenglish said:
In the competition benchrest forum, Jackie Schmidt posted:



That got me thinking about stuff that would have been way off-topic in that forum, so I've posted here. To wit:

Big clubs with lots of members and low fees can have good facilities and (maybe) the budget to maintain them. They need lots of ongoing maintenance because they have so many members who don't follow the rules and do bad things at ranges. We've all seen centerfire cases on the rimfire firing line. I've seen centerfire cases left behind at ranges where supposedly only rimfires are allowed, period. Some members would love to shoot at bottles, glass bottles, glass bottles filled with gasoline, etc.

To illustrate - I once built a temporary 25-meter rapid fire pistol range for a U.S. shooting team (you know, the guys who go to the Olympics) qualifying event. The morning after I built it, I arrived at the range to find a local shooter merrily shooting holes in the base of the aluminum target frame, right where the control cables pass through the $25K mechanism. His bullets were landing about 2 feet from where the compressed nitrogen tanks were installed. His attitude was that if it was between the berm and the firing line, he had a right to destroy it by blowing holes in it. After all, we wouldn't have left all that machinery on the range if we didn't want people to shoot at it, would we? (I threw the guy off the range, took his identifying info, and let the NRA seek compensation from the club for the damage. It was one of the few times in my life when I was seriously tempted to initiate physical violence.)

In short, when your club gets big enough, there will inevitably be a too-large number of slobs in the member population.

Small clubs (the post that started this up was talking about the Tomball club) can have good facilities specialized to the needs of their core members and not need as much maintenance budget because they don't have so many members who are yahoos and destroy things for the sheer joy of unbridled nihilism.

We have both in the Houston area.

What we don't have are any clubs that follow a model that's common in Europe - charge $5000 (or more) a year for membership, provide super-premium facilities (with full time staff, restaurants, etc.), and maintain zero tolerance for any members who don't respect the facilities or their fellow members.

There are legal and cultural reasons that such clubs are rare in the U.S. I don't know of any, certainly none in my area (Houston). The most expensive club I know of is $200 a month, plus a $7500 buy-in, for their most premium membership. I doubt that even that figure approaches what it would cost to run a truly professional club; the club I'm talking about is attached to a large retail facility and makes most of its money from retail sales.

Club business models are all over the place, clearly. Just as clearly, truly high-quality ranges are expensive to build. (The airgun range, by itself, cost over a million dollars to build for the Atlanta Olympics.)

So could a "premium club" concept fly?

What do y'all think? Would you be willing to pay a premium for membership to a club whose facilities and culture matched your needs perfectly? What would that ideal club provide, what would it look like, and how much would you be willing to pay?

Or, asked another way, what's the perfect gun club concept (in your opinion) and how much do you think members ought to be willing to pay if you got your perfect club up and running?

Just curious,

Ben
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While I don't doubt your problem at all....I'd venture a guess that at least 80-90% of us live in a place that we can drive to in less than an hour, that we could own to shoot for near the $9900 for the first year that the club you mentioned requires. Even if it took you and a few buddies to buy it at $9900 each, you'd own it. That's just a crazy amount to belong to a club. Of course there are country and golf clubs that charge much more but they usually come with nice accomodations and bartenders--Mike Ezell
 
mwezell said:
... at $9900 ... That's just a crazy amount to belong to a club.
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I agree. Even though they provide some fun things like free guns (you can borrow anything from their stock of rental guns at no cost), you still wind up giving them even more money for ammo. And all you wind up with is the ability to stand on the crowded firing line of a very nice indoor pistol range. Of course, to me, "very nice indoor pistol range" still means dark, loud, and claustrophobic.

mwezell said:
Of course there are country and golf clubs that charge much more but they usually come with nice accomodations and bartenders--Mike Ezell
Click to expand...

I guess that's the underlying reason I started the thread. I've always wondered why shooters don't care to pay for nice accommodations.

In nearly every other part of life, I see people buying the same products at highly disparate prices, depending on how the product is presented. There always seems to be demand from both ends of the spectrum. You can play golf at a municipal course for a few bucks or you can plunk down a million to buy in at a high-end club. It's still just golf. You can spend a thousand bucks for a clapped out Ford Fiesta at a "buy here, pay here" car lot or you can fork over a fortune at a Ferrari dealership. It's still just transportation. I wear jeans and polo shirts pretty much every day but I commonly work with people in $3000 suits. Either way, it's still just something to cover our nakedness.

By contrast, shooting seems to have no high end. Lots of shooters are willing to trek out to the boonies and shoot in what looks like a garbage dump. Yet at the other end of the spectrum, there's...nothing. I always thought that was strange.
 
I am lucky, at least in the area of range availability. There are 3, club run, outdoor ranges that are about 45 min. from where I live, and a commercial indoor pistol range within ten. Having been on the board, head of a range building committee, and president of one of the club ranges, and currently serving as a volunteer rangemaster at another, I feel like I know something about ranges. The problem isn't so much money as it is the will to run a consistently safe and orderly firing line. I can put up with a lot of things, but being on a firing line with a shooter that is unsafe and is unsupervised, except for other shooters is at the core of the problem, and until a club manages to overcome that problem, very little else matters. Once that problem is resolved, everything else is relatively easy. The thing that makes solving the big problem hard is the way that clubs are organized. Many times those in leadership positions are remote from day to day operational problems. This is generally because they are volunteers and have busy lives with many responsibilities, and because in many cases no matter how long they have been involved, they may not have any time in running a busy firing line. I think that one good way to improve this situation is to require all voting board members to have served as a rangemaster for sufficient time to be fully competent at running a busy firing line on their own. With this common experience, I think that boards would make better decisions that would result in safer ranges. Without it, they will generally miss the mark. In general, it is good to have experience doing the thing that you are supervising. Getting boards of directors to put this requirement on themselves is another matter. That IS the problem.
 
Interesting thread.

I hope folks don't get irritated that I take this a little different direction.

For about three years I belonged to two shooting clubs in our area. One is much nicer -- an extensive layout with ranges for a whole variety of different weapons and needs.

The other is a small club with a nice range that -- alas-- only has about eight firing points. They also have a small pistol range furnished with one simple wooden table.

I stopped paying my membership in the big club. Problem there is the "clique" way the club is run. The officers and board members pretty much do anything they want. I suspect they just use their rank-and-file members to raise the needed money, but the average guy is pretty much kept outside the loop.

Just for one example -- they closed the main rifle range all summer and set up a "substitute" range with no adequate benches or seating. The main range was closed for bulldozing and improvements. But even with the "closed" range, the board members and officers just shot there whenever they pleased so long as no construction was actually going on.

It is like -- if you are one of the "clique" of movers and shakers, you do anything you want. When you complain they say, "become more active." I could be more active but the range is a ways away and a long drive for me to attend meetings.

The "little" club I described above is very nice and friendly. Everyone you meet is friendly. I get around the small size of their range by just shooting weekdays when there's no crowd. Their annual fee is less than half of the charge for the fancy range. They have activities like dinners, and we occasionally attend. The "fancy" range doesn't have any social activities, just "work days."

Anyway, the main emphasis for me is just a nice friendly club where you feel to be treated fairly, there's no "inner clique" who do anything they want, and there are at least a few social activities each year.

Just my feeling about clubs . . . . .
 
Greg Culpepper said:
Ben,

The clubs that I have belonged to have met my needs perfectly. One of my needs is not to pay $5000/year for a place to shoot. I prefer the American Model. I guess if I wanted to live like a Europian I would move to Europe. Are you listening Obama? That was a rhetorical question.

Greg
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I don't think there's any $5000/year in the UK.
i pay £130 a year to shoot about $250,i don't think $5 a week is expensive.
I feel honoured to shoot with such a great set of people,from all walks of life.
Some people drive more than 6 hours to get here to shoot,so you can hardly call it a plinking club.

My only concern is that at 41 years old,i am one of the younger members of the club.We need to get more young people shooting,or the sport will simply die.
 
benenglish said:
By contrast, shooting seems to have no high end. Lots of shooters are willing to trek out to the boonies and shoot in what looks like a garbage dump. Yet at the other end of the spectrum, there's...nothing. I always thought that was strange.
Click to expand...

In Ontario, at least, there is an exception to that -- trap and skeet shooters. Those folks will fork out lots of money for their gear, and while I don't shoot that discipline myself, I am told that the range prices here reflect that, particularly around the Greater Toronto Area.

Now I've seen pictures of some of the ranges in Europe with high fees, and their facilities blow away (ah, figuratively) anything we've got in Ontario. The electronic targets and high resolution video of targets look wonderful. More times than I can count, I have found myself wishing for such a thing.

-- Stephen
 
The character of gun clubs

I belong to a rather large club last year we had 600 members.
It's a full facility club also with trap skeet sporting clays pistol
Indoor pistol and small bore 300yd pit for high power and of course 200 benchrest. Yes we have a few of those problems Butt... they are caused by people who think it's a public range and poach on the property at times.
The Pm is usually shared by the people who actively shoot in each type of shooting. The clincher is an annual fee. Your required to work 4 hrs or Pay a fee. 4 hrs a year anyone can do that easily.
 
From my limited observation

there are some small clubs that are great and some very large clubs that are great. Int the middle is a hodge podge of good and bad.

Personally, the only thing I go to the range for is to, compete in events, test loads and mebby sight in a new scope mounting. I find no pleasure in shooting guns just to shoot them,except for machineguns. Automatic weapons are just plain fun for me.

I would pay a premium to not have the General Public present. I would pay a premium to have the club be a Benchrest Only club. I realize that a number of clubs depend on the revenue from the GP paying to shoot there without becoming members and members who never come. I wouldn't mind the number of members being large as long as they were there for Benchrest related activities. I think it is a waste to have a range sitting idle most of the time when many of us only want and need a couple of hours every now and then.

I use to have a 200 Yd range in my back yard. In my view, this is the best possable situation. Nothing better than not having to pack up and go to the range to TEST.
 
I think there are lots of reasons

bisley said:
I don't think there's any $5000/year in the UK.
i pay £130 a year to shoot about $250,i don't think $5 a week is expensive.
I feel honoured to shoot with such a great set of people,from all walks of life.
Some people drive more than 6 hours to get here to shoot,so you can hardly call it a plinking club.

My only concern is that at 41 years old,i am one of the younger members of the club.We need to get more young people shooting,or the sport will simply die.
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that there are limited numbers of young people who are active shooters. I think the main reason is they have too many other things pulling at them and shooting is an easy one to avoid. Many of us came to serious shooting later on in life. ( I was in my 40's :) ). There isn't a real good answer I don't think but I don't particularly care the age of the shooter as long as they are safe and curteous to others.
 
Clubs and prices

I belong to two local clubs and have for over twenty years. The dues are reasonable, the members friendly and responsible and someone has to vouch for your character. Any member observing damage to either club is encouraged to report the behavior to club officials. Idiots are thrown out and, in the case of damage or vandalism, prosecuted. These rules keep a nice group of courteous and responsible shooters.

As far as paying big dollars to join a premium club it just goes against my grain; kind of defeating the purpose of shooting. There is a clientele of shooters who still adhere to a code of civility that keep our clubs enjoyable. There are no better people to keep order and ensure the rules are followed than fellow club members.

Lou Baccino
 
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bisley said:
I don't think there's any $5000/year in the UK.
Click to expand...
lojak said:
In Ontario, at least, there is an exception to that -- trap and skeet shooters. Those folks will fork out lots of money...

Now I've seen pictures of some of the ranges in Europe with high fees... The electronic targets and high resolution video of targets look wonderful.
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I should have been more specific in the beginning. When I threw out that $5000/year figure, I was thinking specifically of a couple of Italian clubs that cater exclusively to shotgunners. Folks who trek up to the line toting Sousa-grade shotguns that cost double what I paid for my last car - well - they're playing in a different league than me. Obviously, there are clubs that charge lots of money to give them what they want.

I'm not in a position join a club like that but I've always wondered why they were so rare in the U.S.

And about those electronic targets - an Olympic-quality rapid fire pistol bay can handle two shooters. The last time I was privy to the real numbers involved in a real project was over a decade ago, but even back then a single bay would cost over a quarter million dollars to build.

Sometimes I wish I had never experienced facilities like that. Fire a 5-shot string and you instantly get the 5 shots plotted on the 5 separate monitors at your firing point, complete with scoring to the nearest hundredth of an inch. The shooters (NOT including me, dadgummit!) who use facilities like that get real spoiled, real fast.

I've never come close to competing at a top-level venue (The closest I've ever come to Olympic glory was sitting next to Ralf Schumann's wife when he won his gold medal in Atlanta.:)) but even the paper-target/pneumatic mechanism facilities I have used have left me with little patience for "normal" shooting ranges.

Sound farfetched? In benchrest terms - how many guys who read this forum and own a Farley front rest would be happy if they were henceforward restricted to one of these? Not many, I'd bet.
 
Pete Wass said:
...Automatic weapons are just plain fun for me.

I would pay a premium to not have the General Public present. I would pay a premium to have the club be a Benchrest Only club....

I used to have a 200 Yd range in my back yard. In my view, this is the best possible situation.
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I agree with all that, in principle.

Although you specified benchrest, maybe the general principle would hold for any sort of specialization. What I mean is - if a club focuses on one or two disciplines, then maybe the members will naturally tend to approach shooting with the same attitudes and needs.

Something to think about...
 
Boyd Allen said:
...The problem isn't so much money as it is the will to run a consistently safe and orderly firing line. I can put up with a lot of things, but being on a firing line with a shooter that is unsafe and is unsupervised, except for other shooters is at the core of the problem, and until a club manages to overcome that problem, very little else matters. Once that problem is resolved, everything else is relatively easy....
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Great post.

It's my impression that high-dollar clubs hire staff to run the line, supervise shooters, and intervene/educate/warn/eject as appropriate when a shooter starts to act in an unsafe manner.

Of course, I've never shot at a high-dollar club that did that. I've only seen pictures.

Worse, the public/commercial ranges I've attended do use paid "range officers" but they tend to be just kids who are alternately goofing off or goofing around except during mandated cease fires when they (supposedly) walk the line to make sure all firearms are safe. They're pretty useless, imo.

Note - "Just kids" needs a caveat; I've reach the age where everyone under 30 looks like "just kids" to me. :cool:

I once read an overview of range design that opined that the only way to design a safe range without relying on responsible behavior from the shooters would be to enclose each firing station in a poured, reinforced concrete box so that no matter what direction the shooter fired, the only person they could hurt would be themselves. A range like that would be a pretty dismal place to shoot but there would be compensation; you wouldn't have to worry about (or even be aware of) the guy at the next firing point doing something stupid. Still, I don't think a club like that is any place I'd like to shoot.
 
Sound farfetched? In benchrest terms - how many guys who read this forum and own a Farley front rest would be happy if they were henceforward restricted to one of these? Not many, I'd bet.

Gee thanks, now I'll be too embarrased to go to the match this weekend in St. Louis...it would have been my first match...Maybe I can paint my front rest a different color!
Mark
 
Our San Angelo Gun Club has 13 pistol bays with one being 100 yards long. We have two good rifle ranges with distances up to 200 yards. Both have canopies that are 100 feet long each. We also have a simple shot gun range with one clay pigeon thrower. We have 60 acres of ranch land Membership dues are $80 per year and we have about 1,000 members.

There is a very fine Clay bird and Skeet club just a few miles from us for those who want to shoot shotguns. There are also two long ranges in our region for those who want to shoot up to 1,000 meters.

More people shoot on the pistol bays than on the rifle range and even with matches, there is always another rifle range for folks to sight in their deer rifles.

We have no paid employes and get enough money to keep the place up.

While personally, I would like to have the place limited to just us 22 shooters we all get along with each other out of a mutual need. We need their money to afford what we have and we help keep the trash off of the range. There are a few rare cases of vandalism every now and then and we stop it when we see it. We just fix up the bullet holes and go on.

For the time being we all have a safe and affordable place to shoot. All in all, I wouldn't trade it for any of those gentleman's Gun Clubs. And think of all the money we save.

As an afterthought, the San Angelo Gun Club would be glad to field a team of shooters who could take on the Dallas Gun Club and the Scottsdale Gun Club in a real, stand on your hind legs and shoot, offhand match if a $50 purse would interest any one.:)

Concho Bill
 
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The character of gun clubs

Heres another example'
I know of a small club that has premium benchrest facilitys.
It has a small number of shooters and members.
Theres a problem though. One group want one thing another group another and still another group another . I sure wish they would get together. it's a nice club with good guys just pulling in different directions.
 
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