Rookie Gets a Bang Out of Trip to Neighborhood Firing Range

It’s learning to shoot the Woodland Hills way.

Couples on dates, parents with young children, attorneys and even rock stars gather at the Warner Center Gun Club, a tony firing range where customers relax in the lobby on leather sofas and sip juice while watching a TV set up for their enjoyment.

It’s a luxurious place to fire a gun, either for sport or to sharpen up on self-defense skills.

Co-owner Paulo Marin says he opened the business about a year ago after being unable to find a comfortable range in a good neighborhood. To solve his dilemma, Marin says he has spent $750,000 transforming the club into the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art shooting range around.

Fruit juice and leather sofas aside, shooting is exactly what most people go there to do.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, like mini-explosions, the staccato rhythm of a rifle shooting invades a classroom where instructor Steve Franklin is teaching Barbara and Roger Stephens, a retired Winnetka couple, and me how to use a handgun.

Inexperienced shooters are required to attend the three-hour class before they are allowed to fire a gun at the range. The class costs $55.

The Stephenses said they were drawn to the class because they inherited a handgun from a relative a couple of months ago.

Roger says he wants to learn how to use the gun for sport and for personal protection.

“Let me put it this way,” Roger says. “If you come at me, you’d get it.”

Barbara says she’s certain that she could never fire a gun at another person, but if one is going to be around the house, she wants to know how to use it.

“You really don’t know what you’ll do when you’re threatened,” Barbara says. “But I don’t know if a gun is the answer.”

I’m taking the class to write about the experience. I don’t own a gun, and the closest I had ever got to one were those the cops wore when I covered the police beat.

Together, we gather in a small room filled with fold-out chairs with desks attached. Franklin sits in front of us behind a big table where three revolvers and a semiautomatic are displayed.

The class starts out with Franklin reviewing safety tips.

“You don’t get a second chance with guns,” he warns.

After learning the differences between revolvers and semiautomatic handguns, we practice loading and then shooting revolvers without bullets.

Once we’ve gotten the form down, we each pick a revolver and head to the front desk, where we are each given a plastic orange basket filled with eye and ear protection, a bag filled with real bullets and two paper silhouettes, both of the upper body of a man with an orange bull’s-eye on his chest.

Inside the range, the smell of gunpowder fills the air, despite a ventilation system that, according to Franklin, pumps out 300 pounds of fresh air per minute.

We pin our silhouettes up on the lines and hit switches sending them back 20 feet.

Roger goes first, and he ends up being a hard if not impossible act for Barbara and me to follow. By the time he finishes, there’s barely any orange paper remaining in the bull’s-eye.

I ask Barbara while her husband is shooting if she’s scared. She nods her head.

“It’s like it’s real bullets,” she says. “I don’t want to play this game. I’m going home.”

But she doesn’t. She stays and shoots.

I’m last, and, yes, I’m scared. I figure I will try firing at least three rounds. I load my Smith & Wesson 686, raise it toward my target, take a deep breath, aim and fire. I take an even deeper breath afterward, and before I know it, I find myself bitten by a competitive bug and yearning to hit the orange bull’s-eye as many times as I can.

I hit it once.

I stop after firing about a dozen rounds. Despite how easy Clint, Arnold and Sylvester make shooting look, guns are heavy and my arms have grown tired. Afterward, I realize I will probably never choose to fire a gun again, but I don’t regret learning how.

A few minutes later, I ask Barbara what she thought of it, and she smiles as she says, “I’ll do it again.”