GEIS-新闻详情

This man wants to open an elegant shooting range in downtown D.C.

2021-09-18 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

Walker Lunn has a different idea about a way to sell newbies on shooting guns.

He’s not going with the usual tactics of fear and hatred, which have been wildly successful for the gun industry.

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Just look at how gun sales skyrocketed during our nation’s recent instability.

Americans bought more than 23 million firearms in 2020. One of the most divisive elections, amid a pandemic, goosed gun sales to highs we haven’t seen in 50 years — and 40 percent of those sales were to first-time gun buyers.

Black Americans bought guns — after white supremacists loudly reacted to the worldwide reckoning over racial injustice — at a 50 percent higher rate last year than in 2019, according to gun industry statistics.

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In the month after the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol, more than 2 million guns were sold — at least 33,000 a day. In. One. Month.

And after a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes by bigots obsessed with the origin of the novel coronavirus that was first identified in China, the gun industry realized that the nation’s Asian American population was ripe for sales, according to a report by the Violence Policy Center.

But that’s not the way Lunn, a 41-year-old gun owner in the District, plans to work his business plan.

Gun reality vs. gun fantasy in Virginia

He’s looking for nostalgia, even a little bit of romance, to sell D.C. on the world of weaponry.

Lunn: “I want to create something unique and fun, something like a Parisian tea shop.”

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Me: “Seriously?”

Lunn: “You walk into a nice cafe and you can try out some firearms. You can buy some firearms and you can enjoy some time with some friends while you’re there.”

Me: Silence. (For a long time.)

Lunn is trying to open a shooting range in downtown D.C., in Penn Quarter or Gallery Place. It’s a bustling part of the District with the Capital One Arena, a movie theater, a bowling alley that closed (he wouldn’t tell me if that’s where he wants to put the range), restaurants and bars.

But a shooting range?

Those are usually in the suburbs, and there are plenty around Maryland and Virginia. But Lunn said he always has to battle traffic to get to those places, and that’s where he got the idea to open one right in D.C. — the bluest of blue, majority Dem city and early adopter of red-flag laws.

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“For me, shooting sports is heritage and tradition, something passed down through my family,” said Lunn, who grew up in New Jersey shooting quail with a double-barreled shotgun. “Because of that, it was never a political issue.”

And I get that. The smell of sage will always bring me back to shooting jack rabbits with my dad in the Nevada desert. My Czech air rifle is still in my old bedroom, a full can of Crosman .177 pellets waiting.

There is nostalgia and history around guns, sure. Sorry, “shooting sports.” Lunn, like many other responsible, recreational gun owners, asks that I use shooting sports rather than guns.

They are part of life in the West or the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

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But the problem is that in places like D.C., weapons are rarely sporting or recreational.

A D.C. shooting is duck and cover; it’s panic in a baseball stadium, four killed in a drive-by, a massacre at the Navy Yard, pop-pop-pop over turf and grudges and deals; it’s a stray bullet that killed a Peace Corps worker and father of two on a date with his wife, a 6-year-old walking with her mom, a 10-year-old getting ice cream, a 15-month-old strapped into his car seat, an 8-year-old whose football team just won its scrimmage.

Guns in D.C. are helping us get back to a homicide rate we haven’t seen in 16 years.

The 40,302 gunshots the nation didn’t hear about

Lunn said he has talked to the folks at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, D.C. police and the city zoning folks to get approval for his shooting club, and he said the paperwork and laws are moving in his favor.

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And he has the clientele. More than 4,000 people obtained concealed-carry permits in D.C. in the past few years, most of them from Maryland and Virginia. One of them is Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who made a great show of carrying her Glock while walking around Capitol Hill.

But he’s not after the Wild West theme of Boebert’s restaurant in Rifle, Colo.

And it’s not going to be a Bat Cave.

“We’re staying away from tactical-inspired design,” he said. “We don’t want to create an experience that is about combat. I want to bring it back to that French countryside feeling. You’ve got your fresh quail, your cheese and your wine. It creates a whole new perspective.”

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The problem is, America’s gun culture needs more than an image makeover. There are nearly 400 million guns in circulation in our nation of just 328 million people (and just 5.8 million quail).

Our culture has changed; the use of guns has changed. In a nation where 31,606 people have died by gunfire — in homicides and suicides — already this year, I don’t think of that sweet smell of sage in the desert with my dad. I can only think of the unshakable stench of death.

Twitter: @petulad