And It Won’t Be Nearly As Noisy As Chuck E. Cheese, Either
By Mitch Berg
Where was this when my kids were that age? A Dallas entrepreneur is building a family-friendly gun range to help teach the next generation of Real Americans [1].
“One of the reasons we’re doing this is, when I had my boys, I didn’t have a place to take them and educate them about how to handle a gun safely,” Prince explained. “I really want families to be able to take their kids here and teach their young shooters how to shoot safely.”
No kidding.
Two rooms will be available for birthday parties.
“The age limit is eight years old. You have to be tall enough to get above the shooting table,” Prince said. “They’re not gonna be left unattended. Parents are gonna be one-on-one, or if there’s not enough parents we’ll have range safety officers here to show them how to do it safely.”
“We’re gonna do a lot of education here at this range,” he added.
The thing non-shooters never get? It can be great education. Shooting, done right, focuses the mind like any martial art – which, indeed, it is. With proper supervision – we’ll come back to that – it can be a great thing to teach kids.
And, this being Texas, there’s a better than even chance most people get that:
The kickoff party Friday drew a big crowd and Prince was being well-received by his neighbors in Lewisville.
Denton County Commissioner Hugh Coleman said he was happy to have the facility in Lewisville.
“I am thrilled to add jobs and add to the tax base, and I think gun rights are for everyone,” he said.
But even in Texas, there are enclaves of Orcs:
But some see things in a different way. Dawn McMullan is a mom raising two sons in East Dallas, and she’s done some gun control advocacy in the past.
[And her past as a “gun control advocate” makes her precisely the least-informed, least-competent person to comment on the subject]
“It makes me very nervous,” she said. “I think eight-year-olds, developmentally, can’t tell the difference between play and reality sometimes.”
“And also to put it in a party or game atmosphere just seems to not respect a gun as much as we should respect guns,” she said.
Ms. McMullan has apparently never met a competent Range Safety Officer (RSO). If good RSOs taught reading, there’d be no illiteracy.
And as re mixing kids and guns? The dispositive factor in kids’ growing up with warped attitudes about gun violence is not “having shot”. It’s “do his parents have a criminal record”, or “does anyone with a record live in the house”, and/or “is there someone in the house with a drug or alcohol problem”, or maybe “is someone in the house so addled that they leave guns lying around where kids can get at them in an idle or dumb moment?”
And even then – who’s going to teach the kids to leave the gun and walk away? Someone who shows them the destructive power behind a gun, and then shows them painstakingly to walk away and tell a (competent) adult? Or Ms. McMullan and her whole “guns are the forbidden fruit” schtick? Hint, Ms. McMullan: that works especially well with teenagers!
But Prince said respect is exactly what he’ll be teaching.
“We truly believe it’s a right and a privilege to shoot and to bear arms,” he said. “But you have a responsibility to know how to do it well. It’s your responsibility to know how to take care of your gun and know how to use it.”
“Ignorance is not bliss in this situation,” he added. “Until they outlaw guns, people are gonna have access to them and should have access to them. And they need to be educated. Take the mystery out of the guns.”
Eagle Gun Range expects to open for business sometime in the late summer or early fall.
I’m smelling bonanza for some savvy Minnesota entrepreneur – and apoplectic strokes for not a few Minnesota lefty pundits. Just saying.
[1] I know, I know – there’s all sorts of confusion as to what “Real Americans” actually means. Its definition is “American citizens who exercise their God-given Second Amendment right, and obligation to keep, bear, and be proficient at arms”.
Glad we could clear that up.
July 9th, 2012 at 8:19 am
Gee, I don’t own a gun, but I completely support the 2nd amendment and oppose oppressive gun regulation. Does that make me a sorta Real American?
July 9th, 2012 at 10:12 am
If you try to do this in Minnesota, the fiction department at the U will go on DEFCON III inventing regulations which will then be passed along to the press, which will create a perceived panic concerning the systematic slaughter of some endangered wild creepy-crawly thingamajig.
July 9th, 2012 at 11:52 am
I’ll bet a gun range is a ten times more peaceful than your average Chuck E. Cheese.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/chuck-cheese-family-feuds-birthday-parties-turn-violent/story?id=15803726#.T2JQhvVXk3z
In Liberal world pediatrician ask about guns in the home (as required by the pediatrics association) when in reality a home with a gun is an order of magnitude safer than a home with a single mom having a live-in boyfriend.
“…most dangerous person in the world is mom’s boyfriend. When women have a succession of men coming through, their daughters will get raped,” he says.”
Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303830204577446512522582648.html
July 9th, 2012 at 12:10 pm
When I was in junior high back in the mid 1960s, in order to get a hunting license, one had to successfully complete a firearms safety training class. We had that training, conducted by our Phys Ed teacher, Cliff Gonyer, in a classroom at Penn Junior HS in Bloomington on a Saturday morning. Beginning at 8:00 a.m. we were taught the various types of guns, with the focus on rifles and shotguns. At 11:00, we went to the old Richfield-Bloomington Gun Club (later re-named Sportsman’s Club) off of France Ave right across from Normandale CC. There, we shot a round of trap or one full box of shells to get familiar with the guns and further safety requirements; i.e. always point the gun down range, keep the action open, safety on, etc. Apparently, these types of courses are no longer taught nor sanctioned by the elitists at the school board.
July 9th, 2012 at 12:12 pm
P.S. to my last; Unless I missed something on their web site, apparently the DNR no longer requires the class, either.
July 9th, 2012 at 1:07 pm
When I was in high school the Gun Club met Thursdays after school. They would be bussed to the local gun range.. On Thursdays, the boys would bring their guns, to school in their cases and store them in their lockers.
No one ever got shot.
July 9th, 2012 at 3:23 pm
“It makes me very nervous,” she said. “I think eight-year-olds, developmentally, can’t tell the difference between play and reality sometimes.”
That belief explains government school “Gay friendly” curriculum perfectly.
July 9th, 2012 at 3:44 pm
Hey Big; I almost forgot this. My daughter got her AA degree from Vermilion Community College in Ely. They had a couple of big gun lockers in the student union where the students that hunted could store them. They could only be checked out during certain hours. We were up there visiting one weekend and we met a couple of our daughter’s male classmates. There had been a news story about a rape on some campus in another state. One of these young men astutely observed that; “Rapes are unlikely here, because no guy wants to take the chance that the girl has a gun in the locker.” It got laughs all around, but I couldn’t help thinking that this factor might have been a subtle deterrent.
July 9th, 2012 at 4:31 pm
At gun ranges they issue free ear protection. I wish Chuck E. Cheese did the same.
July 9th, 2012 at 5:00 pm
Don’t forget the Orc in Chief and his gun-hating appointee David Michaels at OSHA. They’re using work safety to shut down gun ranges (danger to employees of second-hand smoke and lead poisoning).
July 9th, 2012 at 7:07 pm
This is great. You hate to see the kids these days wasting so much ammunition when they shoot up their schools.
July 10th, 2012 at 6:49 am
Well ac, that just illustrates what libturd indoctrination has done to our students!
July 10th, 2012 at 7:22 am
You’re right, Boss Hogg. That never happens. And if it did, the answer is to arm all the other third graders so they could take the shooter out right away.
Bet you ate a whole lot of paste when you were that age.
July 10th, 2012 at 10:55 am
I learned to shoot at a gun range in the basement of the Administration Building of Eastern Montana College. At the ripe age of 14.