At NRAAM 2026 I had a chance to talk to Sheriff Ken Campbell of Gunsite Academy fame. The interview was conducted through my participation in the Voices of the Second Amendment — made possible by Beretta Holding.
Campbell is the chief executive officer of Gunsite. The academy was founded in 1976 by former Marine Lt. Col Jeff Cooper as the American Pistol Institute. In 1999 the API was purchased by current owner Buz Mills and he rebranded the school Gunsite Academy.
Gunsite is celebrating their 50th anniversary this year and there are a host of opportunities to get in on the action. Campbell talks about the academy, upgrades that have been made to the facility, their youth camp, and even cigars and whiskey.
John Petrolino: Today we’re here at the NRA Annual Meeting 2026 and we’re at the Voices of the Second Amendment row, which is brought to you by Beretta Holding. Ken, I’m really glad that you took the time to talk to me today, and I know you’ve got a lot of exciting things to talk about. Let’s get started with Gunsite. Who is Gunsite? What is Gunsite? Let’s talk about the rules.
Ken Campbell: Okay, all right, boy, there’s the rest of the show right there. If you don’t know — and how you have not heard about Gunsite? — well, shame on me and my marketing director, I guess. But Gunsite’s, the world’s oldest and largest privately owned firearms training academy.
The legendary Jeff Cooper founded Gunsite in 1976. When they opened the doors, it was 162 acres. There were two square ranges — traditional ranges — one live-fire shoot house and one outdoor live-fire simulator. Fifty years later, we’re over 3,200 acres. We have 27 ranges…that we admit to the insurance company. We have multiple live-fire indoor and outdoor simulators. We’re Disneyland with guns.
JP: Perfect.
KC: And we teach. We keep good Americans alive and we teach you gunfighting skills. We’re not a competition-based school. We’re teaching you how to fight with your pistol, carbine, shotgun, general rifle, edged weapon, and on and on with multiple classes from there. So we’ve been at it and we’re really celebrating this year.
JP: That’s awesome. So what are you celebrating? You have the …
KC: 50th anniversary.
JP: So that’s tremendous. And the actual anniversary celebration happens in …
KC: That’ll be at our Gunsite, alumni shoot on October 3. The alumni shoot’s always the first Saturday in October and it’s a charity match. Our great instructors donate their time and their travel. We donate the ranges, and we do a charity match. The profits, go to the Jeff Cooper Legacy Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that was started by the Cooper family after Colonel Cooper passed away. They do scholarships. It’s JeffCooperFoundation.org if I’m not mistaken.
So this event is an all-day shooting match. We call it a social engagement slightly interrupted by gunfire.
It’s an all-day match. Your match fee includes your fresh-cooked hot dogs and hamburgers and a big sit-down cowboy barbecue that night. The whole front of our classroom is a prize table, and our great industry partners here donate prizes.
I don’t mean hats and t-shirts, I mean Mossberg shotguns, Vang Comp shotguns, Aero Precision rifles and Crimson Trace products. And SureFire is a big sponsor with lights and so on. But everybody’s gonna win something, and it’s just a great event. That’ll be the culmination.
And then two real special things we’re doing that we can talk about — the 50th anniversary guns here in a little bit — but two special things we’re doing is Granite Mountain Distillery is in Prescott, Arizona. They’re doing the Gunsite Range Master Reserve Rye with our own label on it, and that’ll be available with the GAS match. And then, being that many of us are cigar guys, we’re having a Gunsite label cigar as part of our celebration.
JP: Oh, that’s awesome.
KC: Because shooting and a good drink after you put the guns away and a cigar are great things.
JP: Now, are those going to be available for the general public also? Can we order those? Or do I have to go to…
KC: The cigars, I think we’re going to be able to make available. It’s ATF regulation. Did you know that they have to approve the design label on a liquor bottle? I learned that in the last couple weeks.
JP: I’m sure, it was an enlightening …
KC: There’s going to be ways they can get those things, whether it’s through the pro shop or we’ll have a link to the cigar company we’re using, or the Granite Mountain Distilleries.
JP: That’s really exciting. Now the shoot that’s coming up, you call it like the alumni shoot. Is it just for alums or how does that go down? So we want to also talk about programs for people who aren’t alums.
KC: That’s correct. You have to be a graduate of a three-day or more Gunsite pistol class to come to the Gunsite Alumni Shoot, and that’s because the courses of fire are challenging. It’s not that other places won’t train you. They can and they do, but we want to make sure you’re a Gunsite grad.
Now, if you just want to come and shoot and experience Gunsite a little bit, in June we have the Calams match, and it also is a charity match for scholarships to needy kids in Yavapai County, Arizona, and it’s about two thirds of a day match. It’s a whole lot of fun, but you can just walk in and shoot in that match.
JP: How do you get to be a Gunsite grad? Gunsite.com right?
KC: Everything’s at G, U, N, S, I , T , E , Gunsite.com and all our classes are listed on the website, the dates, the cost, the equipment, lodging, transportation tips. We’ve tried to think of as many things as we can. In our 50 years we kind of got a general idea what people need to know to attend. You can get on there and get enrolled in the variety of classes that we offer.
JP: What about people who say, ‘Well, I’m not the best shooter. What should I do? Should I come? Should I not come? I’m worried about embarrassing myself.’
KC: Don’t be. A lot of people think that our primary business is law enforcement and military and we are very proud of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, coasties, Space Force that come and take classes with us. We’re very proud of the law enforcement, whether it’s that little bitty police department that the officer or the deputy has saved their nickels and dimes to get there, or whether it’s those alphabet agencies that we’re not supposed to talk about that come and take training, that’s not our primary business.
You are our primary business. I call them Earth people. That’s the majority of Gunsite’s business. And we’re going to teach you how to keep yourself and your family alive. Whether you come in and you’re saying, ‘Can you help me open this box and make this work?’ or you’re coming in with some skill sets, we work with both, and we will make both of them better.
So please, please don’t be intimidated. And ladies, you’re a big part of the firearms industry, too. We do some ladies-only classes. And guys, if you’re watching and listening, plug your ears. Ladies, perk up here. You’re better students than the men are. We know all there is to know about everything.
JP: Of course we do.
KC: We’re male.
JP: My wife will tell you that.
KC: I know that I’ve seen Mel Gibson and Clint Eastwood, and I know all these things to know. We’ve got that machismo. Ladies listen and do and they’re learning curve rockets. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you want us to yell at you and have you push on Arizona, we have those skill sets. We don’t need to. It’s adult education. You’re going to have fun and when you do, your learning curve rockets, so don’t be intimidated.
And if you are a true novice shooter, in the last five, six, seven years, we’ve seen an increase of people that literally are novice shooters. Whether it’s defund-the-police or the riots or whatever your reasoning is.
We started a new class and right now it’s still called Day Zero, and it’s the Sunday preceding a five-day class. It’s literally is explaining…this is a gun. This is the muzzle. This is the trigger. And so we go, this is a good holster. This is why. This is a bad holster. This is why. And then when we go down range.
There’s only four or five or six people on the firing line when you experience those guns going off at once and the brass coming so you — experience in that controlled environment before you jump into the deep end of the pool, if you will, on Monday morning.
In the three years we’ve been doing Day Zero with pistols we’ve had zero negative evaluations. And we have the students complete an evaluation for every class that they attend. We’ve had zero negative evaluations. We’ve had three people decide after the end of Day Zero, this isn’t for me, and that’s okay. It’s better that they learn then than, as opposed to be having to come down on Tuesday afternoon and say, ‘John, come on up to the principal’s office with me.’ You’ve been there before.
JP: They have a seat for me. Put my name on it.
KC: We started doing that with pistols and now we’re seeing much more interest in modern sporting rifles, AR-type rifles. Now we even do a Day Zero for the modern sporting rifles. We’re trying to grow with the needs of what our client base is.
JP: Is there anything that we’re leaving on the table that we need to bring up and get out there about Gunsite? About anything that you’re doing or the celebration?
KC: Well, some other fun stuff. We’ve got some special guns being made up for us. We partnered with Ruger and Davidson’s for an RXM. A 50th anniversary RXM. And it’s in a two-tone color that’s not standard availability. Those pistols are available through Davidson’s dealers and through the Gunsight pro shop.
We’ve partnered again, continuing, with Steyr. Steyr built the Scout Rifle for Colonel Cooper. He was a big believer in the Scout Rifle and that could be an entirely different episode. So we’ve got one of the original gray stock Jeff Cooper Edition scout rifles, we’re doing 50 of those, so it’s limited edition.
Aero Precision’s making up a carbine for us, a 50th anniversary carbine, and then there’s an accessory package to go with it.
And then, and actually this is the first time I’m speaking of this one publicly. We’ve partnered with Shadow Systems, and we’re going to have their LE edition pistol. It’s a midsize striker-fired. Only it’ll have the Aimpoint COA on it, and our 50th anniversary stuff. And those should — knock on wood, my head for the closest thing here — those should be available through the Gunsight pro shop in the next 10 days.
We’ve got a few balls in the air. If you’ve not been to Gunsite in the last two or three years, you will not recognize our campus. We’ve spent near $3 million in capital improvements. We’ve got an all-new pro shop, all-new offices.
We’re converting, depending on when you went to Gunsite, this building that was either the original classroom or the pro shop, and then warehouse. In about another 10 days, it’ll be back to being a classroom.
I’m out of classroom space a lot. It is a great problem to have, but I need more classrooms. We’ve had 11 record student years in a row, so I needed more seating capacity.
We built bigger bathrooms. There’s new instructor quarters. We’ve got our mess deck, a new mess deck where you eat lunch. It seats 125 now. We’ve got the new maintenance barn. The old buildings are being demolished, so it’s all clear campus. I’m telling you, you’ll pull in there if you’ve not been there in three years and look around and you’ll think, “No, no, I, I must have made a wrong turn.”
It’s exciting times there. And I’m just so proud of Gunsite’s owners, Buz and Sonya Mills, for their support, and then the great staff at Gunsite. You know, Ronald Reagan said, if you surround yourself with good people that you trust and you empower them to act … and that’s what we do at Gunsite, and that’s why we’re the best at what we do.
JP: I think that’s fantastic. You also have some youth programs.
KC: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
JP: Almost like a camp …
KC: It’s a send-your-youth-to-gun camp. We’re talking about kids 12 to 16, and it has to do with maturity level more than age, because they’re going through the same pistol class you and I are taking, pistol and general rifle.
The only thing different we do is on Sunday afternoon. We have a barbecue where all the kids and the families can get together and then we send the kids off and say, all right, we have a battle buddy program. So you John, you and I are partners. You got to be able to come up and introduce each other, and then the rest of the week, you’re inseparable.
If one of you needs to go to the bathroom, the other one’s standing by outside so we know where everybody is. And we also tell you, you got to come up with nicknames for each other. Here, the kids come back and they’re like, ‘Okay, we did the introduction thing, but we didn’t do nicknames.’ We’re like, ‘That’s okay. We’re gonna come up with your nickname.’ ‘Oh, wait, Mr. Ken, I’ll, I’ll come back with a nickname.’
So the kids start and they strap on Monday morning, just like you and I do for class, and they take the exact same gunfighting class as the week goes on.
It’s so great to see those young Americans with those young minds, quick reaction times, that Rush Limbaugh young skulls full of mush, right? They don’t have the bad habits and boy, they just rock it.
And it’s the media spending all the years — I did in law enforcement 35 years — the media portrays the bad kids. The good kids don’t get the publicity. Well, these aren’t good kids, these are great kids. These are great Americans.
And when you teach these young people to be responsible with guns, they’re going to be responsible with drinking and driving and dating and life. And if you aren’t involved with 4H shooting sports and Project Appleseed, you need to be because we need more of those young kids, because we’re getting a little grayer of hair, and we need these young people to be able to take our place in a few years. We do all three levels of pistol and a general rifle class. It’s a great time.
JP: No, absolutely, and I got one more thing that I want to touch on real quick before we wrap up. You’ve got a really interesting habit that you’re into when you travel and you get on airplanes.
KC: I did it yesterday.
JP: And I want you to talk about that, because this is…I think it’s cool.
KC: We’ve got great industry support and there’s still a few print magazines out there, the NRA pubs and some of the others, Guns & Ammo, and they send us the magazines. Well, I take my gun publications on the airplane with me and I always put them in the seat back in front of me, and I take a picture of it and post it on our social media.
I say, ‘If you know, you know.’ And then after I’ve read it, I turn the publication sideways, and I take the safety pamphlets and the vomit bags and all that, and I hide it in the seat back so when the cleaners come through, they don’t find it.
You can find something other than the movie schedule when you get on that airplane and I have great fun with it. If you get on an airplane, let’s promote our industry, right? Because Ben Franklin spoke of the republic, and he said, “If we don’t hang together, we will surely hang separately.” That’s very true of our industry.
Well, if you get on that airplane, you start reading the gun magazine, the person next to you will either go, ‘Oh, you’re one of those,’ and they leave you alone and life is good, or they start talking about the gun publication, which gives you a reason to talk about guns. Or, in my case, I weave Gunsite into that conversation and life is good.
I posted yesterday when I flew out here from Phoenix and I’ve got two more magazines saved. I’m gonna do the same thing going back. And you need to be doing that, too.
When we were in Europe a few years ago, I left some on British Airways and my gosh, when they found gun publications, they probably had to decontaminate the aircraft.
JP: Well Ken, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This is very exciting for Gunsite, for you, and for Buz Mills and everyone over there and the family. So like you said, we can find you where online?
KC: It’s Gunsite.com. If you want to reach me direct, it’s pretty complicated. You ready? ken@gunsite.com.
JP: Sheriff Ken Campbell, thank you so much.
KC: So I got one more thing.
JP: Go ahead.
KC: When are you coming to Gunsite?
Portions of this interview have been edited for clarity and brevity.