Las Vegas shooting ranges: the perfect place to talk politics while firing machine-guns

The establishment owners are surprisingly pro-Obama: 'We love the guy, every time he talks about gun control, our sales shoot up by 500%'

The rather swanky Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas (Rex)

“Hey guys, it’s couples night at our strip club – do you like sweaty fake tits?” The bored-looking man trying to lure tourists into his Las Vegas strip joint had clearly lost the will to live. It’s a feeling that most sane people experience after a couple of days in this “anything goes” desert town. I’m here for work and staying at the rather swanky, casino-free, Mandarin Oriental. This makes a sojourn here a lot more tolerable than usual. Being casino-free is an extraordinarily rare thing in this town. Even as you step off the plane there are slot machines tempting you to jettison your hand luggage and get stuck in.

Later, wandering around one of the vast hotel casinos that line the Strip, I started to have an out-of-body sensation. This city tends to have that effect. Vegas carpets are hideous, forcing your eyes up to the gaming machines and tables. Oxygen is supposedly pumped into the rooms, and you will never see any clocks. The place becomes a permanent neon night with a handy ATM never more than a hundred yards away. On my first night out, I eventually escaped the glitzy, cash-draining sensory overload and ended up in a bar drinking something called “ass juice.” Stay classy Las Vegas.

The following day I headed to a gun range to chat to some customers about politics while we fired machine-guns. I was careful not express my less than positive views on Donald Trump as he is very popular among the Vegas shooting community. Mind you, the establishment owners were surprisingly pro-Obama. “We love the guy, every time he talks about gun control, our sales shoot up by 500 per cent.”

The last time I was in a Vegas firing range, in 2003, the targets included Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Jacques Chirac (this was the era of “cheese-eating, surrender monkeys” and “freedom fries”). I wondered who the new bogeymen would be. To my surprise, most targets were zombies and masked intruders. The American enemy had turned faceless.

“Isis just don’t have a public face we can make a target out of…” said the shooting instructor despondently.

I chatted to a couple on a shooting date. As her boyfriend hammered away on an enormous assault rifle, the girl told me that she was the star of a YouTube channel in which she shot large guns while dressed only in a bikini. I nodded and smiled, like this was a normal conversation.

The link between shooting and women is pushed hard in the publicity brochures for these shooting ranges. One offered a “VIP shooting session” and the photo showed a man in a tuxedo holding a large gun, sitting on a bed in between two busty-looking women wearing very little. I asked the owner if the girls and the bed came with the package and he looked confused and said “of course not”. I didn’t take this any further. It’s difficult to be cheeky to someone carrying a powerful pistol in a holster on their hip.