HUNTINGTON BEACH : In the Line of Fire : Foes Take Aim at Plans for Huntington Beach Shooting Range

Like a ghost town, Huntington Beach’s gun range stands in ruins, a monument to a bygone era.

Near the city’s Central Park, the firing range is enclosed by tall log fences chewed up by decades of bullets. Thousands of casings lie amid tattered paper targets bearing faded images of human torsos. And sprawled in the dust, a solitary pocked mannequin--the type used for department store displays--bears witness to the accuracy of marksmen past.

For more than a quarter-century, Huntington Beach police officers and private gun enthusiasts came here to hone their shooting skills. But two years ago, after a stray bullet shattered a glass door in a nearby home, the City Council voted to close the facility rather than upgrade it to higher safety standards.

Now the city is weighing a plan to replace it with a new indoor shooting range a few blocks away, but the proposal is drawing fire on several fronts.

“We are in the process of formulating a recommendation,” said Ron Hagan, the city’s community services director, “and it’s been controversial.”

Critics say a new facility would be prohibitively expensive to build and operate, and that Huntington Beach has more pressing demands on its budget. But law enforcement officials point out that officers must have a place to train and now have to drive out of town to do so. Some private gun enthusiasts support a new city range, though others doubt whether the public would use it.

The owner of Firing Line, now the city’s only shooting range, says his business is operating at about 20% of capacity, roughly half the volume it was enjoying just five years ago.

“There’s a lot of anti-firearms sentiment going around,” owner Chris Vrakelos said. “It’s terrible--we’re just breaking even.”

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A recent consultant’s report commissioned by the city could render the debate moot. It estimates that, beyond the $4.5 million required to build a gun range suitable for the public and police, operating it would cost Huntington Beach $236,000 to $291,000 a year.

“There just isn’t the market to make it self-supporting,” the city’s Hagan said. “We would have to charge $20 per hour per lane, where at the old range they used to pay $6.”

The city has a potential site for the indoor range: 6.5 acres on Gothard Avenue that is now being used by a lumber company as a storage yard. But no matter its location, a new facility almost certainly would draw protest, officials concede.

In 1968, when the city built the old range, it was surrounded by fields, Hagan said. But as the area grew, houses and businesses were soon close enough that noise and safety became issues, eventually leading to the facility’s closure, first to the public in 1995, then entirely.

“Outdoor ranges are no longer feasible in Huntington Beach,” he said. “Nobody is going to build an outdoor range in an urban area any longer.”

Indoor shooting ranges are much better at containing noise and bullets but much more expensive to build and maintain. To cover the cost, they must charge fees that are dramatically higher than those at outdoor ranges, but there is a limit to how much the gun-owning public will shell out.

“All the surveys,” Hagan said, “show that $10 to $12 per hour is the maximum that shooters will pay.”

No one debates that firearm training is essential for law enforcement officers. Because of that, Hagan said, the city is exploring the option of building a small shooting range open only to police agencies.

“The cost of a range is high,” he said, but the potential cost of liability lawsuits if the adequacy of officer training were challenged in court would be higher.

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The police-only solution is endorsed by the Huntington Beach Police Department, which now spends about $42,000 a year training its SWAT teams and long-rifle marksmen at shooting ranges in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Regular handgun training, a department spokesman said, is done at a facility in Fountain Valley.

A few other Orange County shooting ranges are open to the public and police agencies: one in Laguna Niguel and two in Orange, including the Orange County Sheriff’s Training Facility there.

Building a new range catering solely to law enforcement is not the solution, though, said Dennis Davenport of Huntington Beach, a spokesman for the National Rifle Assn.

“The citizens . . . built the [old] facility in 1968,” he said, “and the recreational shooters haven’t gone away. Essentially, about half of the households in any given community have firearms, and, if you have that many shooters, you need a place where they can learn to use their guns safely and correctly.”

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In the end, economics could be the deciding factor.

City Councilman Tom Harman, an outspoken critic of publicly subsidized shooting ranges for private citizens, argues that Huntington Beach has bigger problems.

“A very small percentage of the population has any need or use for a gun range,” he said. “Why spend millions for a limited number of people as opposed to using the money for youth sports, senior citizens, infrastructure repair or transportation?”

As the debate continues and the city staff prepares a report on the matter for the council later this month, events in a neighboring town may overtake planning. Fountain Valley, where Huntington Beach officers now do handgun training, hopes to begin work within 18 months on a new indoor shooting range.

“We will not both have facilities,” Hagan said. “There is no way that would work. If they were to beat us in getting theirs approved, we would back off--it’s kind of a matter of whoever puts shovels in the ground first.”

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Gun Range Controversy

Huntington Beach city officials are weighing a plan to replace the shuttered gun range in Central Park with a new indoor shooting range a few blocks away. A look at the proposed range.

Source: City of Huntington Beach