Essay: Denver city-slickers are paying big bucks to shoot, smash the things country kids do for free

Every few weekends in junior high and high school, I’d work out my frustrations by smashing, shooting and burning. My friends and siblings usually joined me in these weirdly innocent, unsupervised activities — normal as they seemed at the time for kids growing up in rural areas. (Those were always within a few minutes’ drive in Southwest Ohio.)

These days, it’s considered aberrant to indulge in such things — classless, dangerous relics of childhoods past, as some might see them. Pure, pointless mischief.

Unless, of course, you’re paying admission and doing it amid a selection of on-tap craft beers and $12 cocktails.

That’s how these newer, managed-chaos activities have struck me. To be sure, there’s no inherent virtue in growing up rural or having a massive fire pit in which to toss things, cackling. Kids who grow up in cities or the suburbs don’t often have access to the same wide-open spaces that my siblings and I employed for, say, bashing in an old TV until it was a spray of shards. (By contrast, country kids are terrible at graffiti and scared of alleys.)

This is less a value judgment than an observation, but I still had to laugh when I saw the Gallery Sportsman’s Club & Range open in Lakewood late last month. The walk-in and membership-based club advertises “a revolutionary new concept” mixing sports and entertainment. The 20,000 square-foot space boasts a pair of indoor shooting bays, a restaurant, a bar, “and a host of amenities to provide an exceptional experience.”

Beware the word “luxury” in marketing materials, which seems as much an invitation to the well-heeled as a warning to people without much money. One can almost picture the stereotypically cigar-champing clientele chuckling it up, scotch in hand, before squeezing off a few rounds. I can’t imagine paying for this.

It’s not much different to me than ax-throwing bars, rage rooms (where you can smash whatever you want with whatever you want) and other activities that have mutated into official, paid activities. These latter examples may aim for younger crowds but are similar in their concept: anger management whilst drinking.