Larry Yatch, the owner of Sealed Mindset and a former Navy SEAL member who served in Iraq, said the Bin Laden experience was designed to give people a realistic glance at what it took to serve in that elite military unit and to draw new clients to the dozens of firearm and martial arts classes he offers each month.

“The way I looked at it was you can’t offend someone if you’re shooting the devil, Hitler or Bin Laden,” Mr. Yatch said, arguing that if he had invented a fictional “bad guy” from the Middle East for the scenario it could have been viewed as anti-Muslim. “If someone’s offended that we’re shooting Bin Laden, well, you’re probably offended that we’re shooting at all.”

Sealed Mindset has based its curriculum on real events before. In recent months, it set up fake carjackings, home burglaries and knife attacks for self-defense training that imitated tragic stories from the news. After the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo., in July, the company held an “active shooter” session that included one scenario in which a masked gunman burst through the door and opened fire on a room full of people.

Image Credit... The New York Times

“Everyone is a superhero in their mind,” Mr. Yatch said. “We watch the news and think we would have done X or we would have done Y. The reality is you wouldn’t unless you were trained.”

The Bin Laden experience, which is advertised as a “Navy Seal Adventure,” is another way to make that point, he said, but with an added black-ops vibe.

The night started with firearm instruction and a mock intelligence briefing — a presentation of maps and 3-D models based on public information about the raid. A yoga class was still meeting in another room nearby as the group practiced rounding a corner and firing at cardboard pictures of Bin Laden in one of the facility’s two shooting galleries.