Daytona Beach Gun Range Will Serve Alcohol In Attached Restaurant

A former Daytona Beach bowling alley will soon be the home of a new business promoting what critics say could be a deadly mix: bullets and booze.

City commissioners Wednesday approved a project turning the bowling alley into a multi-use facility that will include, all under one roof, a gun range, a gun store and a restaurant with a license to sell liquor.

The project’s detractors are worried about the potential for disaster when guns and alcohol mix, while its owners claim that the diners and shooters will be kept distinctly separate with adequate safety measures.

“I do not believe that guns and alcohol are a good mix,” Daytona Beach commissioner Ruth Trager, the lone no vote against five in favor, told Patch. “Or as somebody would say: bullets and booze do not mix.”

Ron Perkinson, one of the co-owners, though, wants to dispel images of shootouts in a wild west saloon or even a drunken bar patron stumbling onto a gun range.

“It’s 100 percent not going to be that,” Perkinson told Patch. “I’ll ask you the same question I tried to ask a bunch of people: When’s the last time you went to Outback or dinner of such a scale and saw a bunch of drunk people?

“It’s not a bar. It’s not a strip joint. It’s not a night club. It’s a restaurant. And it’s more of an upscale restaurant,” he added. “I would say it’s at least to the scale of Outback, probably a little higher.”

There will be plenty of safety measures in place, he says, to make it “the safest range in the country.”

For one, when restaurant guests order alcohol, not only are their licenses scanned, so are those of everybody with them. Visitors to the gun range have their licenses scanned; if they’ve had alcohol in the restaurant, they don’t get to shoot.

Plans are also in place, Perkinson said, for staff members to be trained by the South Daytona Police Department. Staffers will also be taught to recognize people who have had too much to drink and will become certified range safety officers.

In the meantime, Perkins, a lifelong hunter who’s owned a gun store for the past three years, says he’s been flooded with criticism and media attention, including from CNN, which has been quick to paint the operation as beer in one hand, gun in the other.

“That’s about as far from the truth as you could possibly be,” he said. “The media is putting these headlines out there, making it appear that way to catch someone’s attention, but unfortunately no one’s actually reading the article as it’s written correctly.”

Even with the professed airtight plan to maximize safety, the project wasn’t without its share of opposition.

One point of contention was the safety measures in place for people who could possibly come over from nearby beach bars.

“You go in and you sign a paper saying, ‘I am sober,’” Trager said. “That’s just like you going into a fireworks place and you sign a paper that says, ‘I won’t use this to scare birds off.’ It doesn’t mean a thing.”

Trager’s objections were partly based on geography.

“It’s close to other places where alcohol is served and people could come over already drunk.”

She isn’t opposed to guns on their own, but would rather see gun ranges, “further out of the outskirts of town, not really in the middle of town, especially not where alcohol is that close.”

“I just don’t like the combination of alcohol and guns,” Trager said. “Guns by themselves: fine. Alcohol by itself: fine. But the mixture is not good.”

The arguments on both sides are nearly identical to those in May 2014 in Oklahoma, where a similar establishment opened. Proponents cited its safety measures while opponents lamented the mixture of guns and alcohol.

No accidents have been reported in its year-plus of existence.

Perkinson hopes for the same thing in Daytona.

“It’s going to be the safest range in the country, and it’s going to be the safest restaurant in the country,” he said. “If it wasn’t, then the $7 million me and my partner are dumping into this place would be for naught. If something happens, we’d be at risk of losing everything. No one with the right mind is going to do that.”