Why 4 stars? Because it was certainly a memorable experience…read more
--- --- ---
For the first 38 years of my life, I had never even touched a gun. That changed with my visit to BTO, and boy was it an experience.
My friend was in town visiting and had a flight back home that evening. I really had no good ideas on what we could do all day, and felt bad that we might end up spending his last day just hanging around my house. After all, it was a Monday and I live way up in the burbs, so choices were very limited. But then I came across the idea of a gun range, suggested it, and he was down.
Truthfully, I was quite nervous about it. Not because I actually thought it was legitimately dangerous, but just because of the unknown. That nervousness started when we officially planned on visiting and slowly accelerated once we arrived, peaking before I took my first shot.
Before we headed up to BTO, I called to confirm that we could just show up, rent a gun, buy bullets and shoot. Indeed we could. So we grabbed lunch and headed over.
For a total newbie, I had no idea what to expect, but I did assume there would be an instructor helping us out every step of the way. It turned out, there was very little assistance and honestly, a shocking lack of oversight, considering I was yelling from the mountaintops that I'd never even touched a gun before. They didn't seem concerned enough to give us more than a quick overview and send us on our way. Fortunately, my friend had shot guns before, albeit many years ago, but at least he somewhat knew what he was doing. We declined to pay $75 per person for someone from the shop to stay with us and help the entire time.
For those like me who are reading this as rookies, here's the biggest takeaway: the sound of these guns in the shooting bays is probably the loudest thing you will ever hear in your entire life. And this is with headphones on. I really never got used to how loud it was - it really was quite unnerving. Especially when I didn't know it was coming and someone in another bay started shooting.
The kick back from the rifle we chose was very minimal. I always assumed that would be worse, but we purposely chose a gun where that wouldn't be an issue. It definitely feels insanely powerful. And it's not that easy to aim. I hit the paper with the targets with about 40-50% of my shots when it was only 25 yards away. One big takeaway from this experience is that anytime you see people in TV and movies using guns like it's no big deal, it's quite ridiculous.
All in all, renting the bay for an hour and shooting about 150 bullets, our total was just under $200. I had absolutely no idea what to expect on the cost for this. If it had been $50 or $500, I wouldn't have been surprised, considering I had no frame of reference. Overall, it was a very unique experience that I won't ever forget. My only gripe is that the gun we used jammed up a lot, so we often had to stop, take the chamber out and un-jam the bullets. That could have been user-error on our part, or maybe the gun was just cheap, I'm not really sure.
