I was down in Las Vegas a few months back to speak at PubCon, and my friend came down who is a Vegas virgin, so we decided to live it up in the town and do the sweetest tourist thing ever: shoot machine guns!
I remember the last time I was down there I saw some sign at the airport (of all places!) that said shoot a machine gun. I have never shot a machine gun and it has been many years since I even shot a gun, so I made a note of it. Well we researched it a bit online and found the place, appropriatly named “The Gun Store”.
Getting to the place required a $10+ cab ride, and is located in a shadier part of town. once you get there the process of signing up and getting a gun is a little to easy. We both signed a sheet of paper/aggreement and he had to give his drivers license as collaterol. Then we had to choose the guns that we wanted to shoot, targets and give them money.
We chose an old tommy gun (Thompson M1A1 SMG .45), this big ass gun on a bi-pod (M249 Minimi .223) and I wanted an MP5 (H&K MP5 SMG 9mm ), which was my gun of choice in the game counterstrike. All their guns can be seen here.
As far as the targets we chose “Saddam” and “Woman Hostage”.
From here we went and got eye and ear protection and went to our training, which consisted of us putting on the protection and heading to the shooting range and being told how to hold the gun and not to touch the barrel.
About 20 seconds later we were shooting maching guns, and it was brilliant/scary as hell.
About 20 seconds after that the first clips were drained. The thompson was perfect and did not jam, the M249 jammed a few times and the MP5 won the POS award for jamming every other round damn near.
They hang the Saddam target upside down so you do not hit the target holding wires when you go for a “headshot”. In about 5 minutes we dropped 150 dollars and tour up some paper…once we left the range we wanted more. So we moved on to handguns.
I think the gun we shot was a .45 magnum and was brilliant, it was twice as loud and powerful feeling as the machine guns and tour a bigger hole in the targets.
Instead of buying a new target we decided to shoot the woman in the hostage target, sorry lady. Here is a video of me shooting the lady inthe hostage target. The damage is shown here:
All in all the experience was a bit strange and expensive, but I would reccommend it to anyone who has never shot a gun or who wants something crazy to do while visiting Las Vegas. They even have $5.00 off coupons all over their website, or they are in any tourist coupon book found in the cabs.
If you do go here and do this, do not do it on your last day in town, as you will be covered in GSR (gun shot residue) and would probably get the dogs sent on you at an airport.
Also check out my reviews of some of the best steakhouses in Las Vegas
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
good shot !!!!!. hahahahaha
THanks for the comments!
Bob Irwin, The Gun Store
do you have a fnp90 or the fn five-seveN to shoot
I was at The Gun Store back in 2003 having way too much fun with an HKMP5. Now I finally know why they had the guys next to us hang their Bin Laden target upside down. At the time, I heard it was for “symbolic reasons”. lol