Matt Valentine teaches writing and photography at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written about gun violence policy for the Atlantic and Salon.

On the easternmost outskirts of Austin, Texas, there’s a gun club where I used to shoot skeet. Families came on weekends and made a day of it—there were picnic tables, vending machines and barbecue grills. A dog slept on the floor of the clubhouse. The adjacent property was a runway for radio-controlled airplanes, which we could see buzzing around beyond the range of the light target ammo in our shotguns. The outdoor skeet fields were neither as thunderous nor as claustrophobic as the indoor firing range in town. I felt safe there.

At that time, I owned a cheap 20-gauge Winchester semiautomatic, but the club would allow members or their guests to borrow the 12-gauge Berettas they kept on a rack near the front desk. One day the rack was empty, so I asked the woman working the register what had happened to the loaner guns. The club wouldn’t be lending them out anymore, she said, at least not for a while. “We had an accident,” she whispered.


For half a second I was surprised, before I realized that accidents—or worse—were inevitable. Nobody at the club had ever asked me or my guests if we knew how to handle a firearm, and we’d never been subjected to background checks before borrowing a shotgun.

State laws vary, but this is the way most firing ranges operate throughout the country—they require customers to show identification, fill out a waiver of liability and sign a form indicating that they’re mentally competent (which isn’t verified by anybody). It’s certainly not a foolproof system—and in addition to a few accidents, there have been more than a few suicides.

Nationwide, the scope of the gun-range suicide problem is hard to estimate. In online discussion forums, gun enthusiasts swap stories about incidents at various ranges. But when accounts turn up in local media, gun-range suicides are often described as anomalous, unprecedented events. In June, a man walked into the Guns, Fishing & Other Stuff store in Vacaville, California, signed a waiver, rented a handgun and shot himself in the store’s basement firing range. The local Fox affiliate ran the story with an editor’s note, explaining that, though the station usually doesn’t report on suicides, they “made an exception in this case because of its bizarre nature.” But gun-range suicides actually aren’t unheard of in California. Less than two weeks after the Vacaville shooting, another gun range suicide made tabloid headlines—Andrew Stern, husband of model Katie Cleary, killed himself at a shooting range in the San Fernando valley. Following a death this January at the Los Angeles Gun Club, the Orange County Register scoured coroners’ data from just three counties and found 64 cases of gun-range suicide over a 12-year period. Other incidents have been reported recently in Massachusetts, Virginia, Wisconsin, Texas, Utah and Oklahoma.

Still, the number of people who shoot themselves at gun ranges is small enough to be overlooked—even politicians who propose expanded background checks on gun sales never talk about regulating gun rentals. But family members of the deceased have called for action, and so have some of the gun ranges themselves. In the polarizing politics of gun violence, this issue has elicited the rarest of responses: collaboration.

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In 2009, among letters describing herself as the antichrist, Marie Moore left a note apologizing to Shoot Straight range in Casselberry, Florida, for the trouble she would cause there. Moore had been involuntarily institutionalized in 2002, which means she should have failed a background check had she tried to buy a gun. But she wasn’t buying—she was renting.

In security camera footage obtained by the Associated Press, Moore can be seen standing behind her adult son as he takes aim at a target downrange. She raises the rented revolver to the back of his head and pulls the trigger. She then turns the gun on herself, while the shooter in the adjacent lane—with whom Moore had been chatting just a few moments earlier—looks on in disbelief. Three weeks later, another man completed suicide at the same gun range, also using a rented gun.

Shoot Straight subsequently suspended the rental program at all of its locations, telling the Orlando Sentinel that rentals wouldn’t resume until a procedure was in place to perform background checks on rental customers, similar to those performed for gun buyers through the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

But federal background checks aren’t allowed for rental customers. “When an individual is acquiring a firearm for rental purposes, the individual is not expected to remove the firearm from the premises,” explained Stephen Fischer of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services. “Therefore, no firearm background check may be conducted by the NICS because the person is not ‘possessing or receiving’ the firearm for personal use off of the firearm owner’s property.”

By 2010, Shoot Straight ranges had resumed renting guns, still performing no background checks. But following additional suicides at the Tampa and Pinellas Park locations, Shoot Straight’s founder announced in January that rental guns would no longer be available at any of the eight Florida ranges. The rule still stands today.

Most firing ranges are understandably reluctant to give up on gun rentals altogether, as they represent a big slice of their revenue. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, target shooting is a $10 billion industry, of which gun rentals (together with handloading, optics and accessories) comprise 17 percent.

But suicides are bad for business too. Sure, a few gun ranges have instituted policies that seem inherently reckless—an Oklahoma range recently applied for (and received) a liquor license, and a Texas pharmacy expanded to include an indoor firing range—but many others have developed various prevention strategies. “Some of them have implemented policies where you can’t show up alone and rent the gun,” explained Catherine Barber of Harvard’s Injury Control Research Center. “You have to bring your own gun, or come with somebody else, or have evidence that you’ve gone through a safety training class so they know you’ve had some access to a gun before.”

Consider, for example, Thomas Brown, who teaches shooters at all levels of experience and skill at a firing range in southern New Hampshire. His most novice students—those who come to the range alone, with no guns of their own and no previous training—can start with a one-hour session. This is the minimum instruction the range requires of someone who wants to rent a gun. “It’s more of a psychological evaluation,” Brown explained. “I don’t tell the person that because I don’t want to make them feel like they’re being evaluated. I tell them it’s a one-hour lesson on firearms safety and range etiquette. During that time I do my evaluation.” Brown acknowledges that he’s no mental health expert, but he’s looking for conspicuous signs that a person might be contemplating suicide—crying, sweating, acting nervous. “I’m making sure the person seems fairly interested in purchasing the firearm for more than the next 15 minutes,” Brown said. “That they have some interest in learning about firearm safety.”

But even that kind of close-up scrutiny might not stop a renter who is determined to die. This is a system in which even convicted felons can easily rent guns, and a customer’s background and intentions are not always readily discernable through observation and gut instinct.

Following the deaths of his mother, step-mother and 8-year-old son, Mark Sobie was abusing alcohol and suffering from depression. In 2010 he used a fake gun to rob a Chase Bank in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His sister convinced him to turn himself in. In her letter to the judge, Christine Jones said she had no idea how her “gentle, loving, lonely, depressed, suicidal brother” could commit the crime. Sobie was convicted for felony bank robbery and sentenced to 30 months in prison, and his name was added to the list of prohibited gun buyers in the federal database. But less than a year after his release, Mark Sobie visited Silver Bullet Firearms, rented a gun and killed himself. Afterward, Jones expressed frustration that her brother had been able to access a gun so easily. Had there been a background check process, she said, “We would have had a chance.”

If firing ranges were able to prevent a suicidal person from renting a gun, though, wouldn’t that person attempt suicide by some other means? Perhaps, but the outcomes might be much different. A 2004 study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine examined hospital records from seven northeastern states over a four-year period and found that, though only 13 percent of total suicide attempts resulted in death, 91 percent of the people who shot themselves died.

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So, what is to be done? The National Rifle Association, which often touts its gun-safety programs, is not helping. The powerful lobbying group has fought to inhibit public health organizations from researching or even discussing gun violence, including suicide. In the 1990s, the NRA led a successful campaign to obstruct CDC research into risks associated with gun ownership. More recently, the NRA has tried to muzzle pediatricians to prevent them from talking about gun safety with parents, and blocked the appointment of surgeon general nominee Vivek Murthy, on the grounds that Murthy agrees with almost every major medical association in the country that gun violence is a public health issue.

But the continuing toll of gun suicides has prompted other groups to take action. Following an unusual cluster of suicides in 2009 (three in one week with newly-purchased guns and one more with a rented gun) the New Hampshire Firearms Safety Coalition brought together gun store owners, shooting instructors, gun rights advocates and suicide prevention advocates to develop strategies to keep guns out of the hands of people who might use them to hurt themselves. Catherine Barber participated, and so did Thomas Brown. “The gun community is at least as interested in preventing suicides as anybody else,” said Elaine Frank, co-chair of the NHFSC. “They take the safety of their premises and their customers very seriously.”

Over the course of two years, the NHFSC developed suicide prevention materials to share with other gun shops, including a tip sheet for firing range operators. Talk to the customer, they advised. Does he or she seem interested in learning about guns? Has the customer mentioned a divorce or a job loss? Does the customer seem distraught in any way? NHFSC advises range operators to trust their instincts, and not to rent a gun to anyone who makes them uncomfortable. Instead, they ask gun range employees to refer suicidal customers to a suicide prevention hotline, 1-800-273-TALK.

The NHFSC also mailed posters to gun stores throughout the state. Concerned about a family member or friend? the poster asks. Hold on to their guns. The message is deliberately crafted to be palatable to gun owners. “Initially when you talk to a gun organization about suicide prevention, there’s a lot of resistance—not because they’re opposed to it, but because they feel this is just a ruse to come in and do something that’s actually going to damage their rights,” Brown said. “The gun community is very shy about laws that would require such things. They’re far more receptive to a private organization.”

Rather than fight the gun rights community and the NRA, the NHFSC is hoping to find common ground for a grassroots approach to suicide prevention. “We’re not talking about taking [guns] away,” Frank said. “We’re not talking about putting [gun owners] on a list that doesn’t allow them to ever purchase a firearm again. We’re not talking about a formal process.” And this informal process seems to have traction. The group says that 48 percent of New Hampshire gun shops and firing ranges were still displaying the suicide prevention materials four to six months after the mailing, and that some of their materials have been adopted by prevention groups in Las Vegas and Maryland.

When I ask the suicide prevention advocates if they wish they had support from the NRA or if they think Congress should require background checks for gun rentals, they steer me back toward reality. They’ve been in this effort long enough to know which strategies might make a difference, and which strategies might only alienate responsible gun owners who are potential allies.

“The 11th commandment of firearm safety is to be alert to signs of suicide in friends and family, and to keep guns from them until they’ve recovered—not through legalistic means, but from a friends-helping-friends approach,” Catherine Barber says. “That’s a very concrete, caring, compassionate thing that people can do for one another that can actually save lives.”