On a recent afternoon in Los Angeles, the veteran Hollywood agent Rob Kenneally was unwinding with his usual post-lunch ritual: firing a few rounds from his 9-millimeter pistol with a couple of friends.
“It’s a meditative thing for me,” said Kenneally, who at an earlier point in his movie industry career also worked part-time as a Los Angeles County reserve sheriff’s deputy. “It’s just always been a way to sort of blow the cobwebs out after a day of work.”
He was sitting in a dark leather armchair at the Range L.A., a members-only gun club on the border of the well-heeled Brentwood neighborhood that has become a gathering place for gun enthusiasts, industry professionals, actors and artists. Kenneally, 67, says he often runs into people he works with, and several of his clients take lessons from one of the club’s shooting instructors.
“It seems to attract, for some reason, people who are in the entertainment business,” he said.
That’s no doubt partly because of its location. Then there’s the atmosphere at the Range, whose interior resembles that of Equinox, the high-end gym chain that also happens to be its neighbor. Not far from where Kenneally sat were a touch-screen coffee machine, a Bevi flavored water dispenser, a shuffleboard table, vintage cowboy-themed posters and artwork mounted on exposed brick walls.
Similar high-end gun clubs (some of them members-only) have started popping up across the country, including Centennial Gun Club in the Denver metropolitan area, Frisco Gun Club outside Dallas, XCAL outside Washington, D.C., and the Blackwood Club, which is under construction in Bergen County, N.J. And the Range has two more locations in the works, in the South Bay and the San Fernando Valley.
These sleek, modern takes on the shooting range suggest that while gun control remains a polarizing political issue in the United States, gun culture has appeal for people across the political spectrum.
— Charles W. McFarlane in Shooting Ranges Go Quiet Luxury