Machine Gun Vegas: that town is just one big old fun-house

Given the history of Las Vegas, it’s amazing that it’s taken so long for someone to come up with this concept. But now they have. There’s now a shooting gallery, Machine Gun Vegas (MGV), that combines: “the look and feel of an ultra-lounge with the functionality of a state of the art indoor gun range.”

The New York Times reported on its opening last week, and gave us snotty, elitist, hoity-toity non-gun types the low-down:

With its provocative mix of violent fantasy (think blowing holes through an Osama bin Laden target with an AK-47) and sexual allure, it is the latest example of how the extravagances and excesses that have defined Las Vegas are moving beyond the gaming table.

It’s not just Osama bin Laden targets, however. The picture illustrating the article show a gal cradling a bad-ass looking gun – I don’t know an Uzi from an AK-47, but this one looks serious – which is semi-pointed at a target the depicts a scary clown.  There are bad guys, and then there are bad guys…

The MGV folks apparently know their audience. Let’s hear it for the graying of the Vegas wild-man conventioneer:

In the main lounge, Barry Burmaster, 54, of Williamsburg, Md., was giddy after he and three friends, in town for a convention, compared a stack of bullet-riddled targets.

“Twenty years ago, I’d spend $400 at the strip clubs,” he said. “Now, I just come here to shoot.”

Others come for the “exotic weapons,” like M-16’s, which may not seem all that exotic to your average Viet Nam vet, but does to a 20 year old fire-arms enthusiast.

The MGV concept raises, in my mind, any number of question – not particular to MGV; I’d ask his about any shooting gallery. Are the guns chained down so no one can run out the door with them – before or after they take a shot at the scary clown target? And what if some psycho-sicko (sicko-psycho?) decided to turn it on the guy?

Not just everyone can wander in off the street and start a shoot ‘em up, however:

…the owners of Machine Guns Vegas said they would carefully screen customers and that their clientele would be made up of people who enjoy the sport of shooting.

Wonder how they’ll do that? 

Will they run police checks?

Do some profiling, which will or will not stand up in the lawsuit when someone gets refused entry – “the prospective client appeared sweaty and confused…he kept muttering ‘I just told the wife, “Honey, I’m going out to hunt humans”…’”?

Can they screen customers by having them take a psychological test, like the Myers-Briggs? (For each question, please choose the activity you’d rather participate in: 1) read Jane Austen or pull the legs off of frogs; 2) shove a fire-cracker up a cat’s butt or listen to Chopin…)

However they do their screening, however they protect their clientele from run-amoks, the good news is that, although MGV looks like an ultra-lounge (whatever that is) it does NOT serve alcohol, perhaps making it the only place in Las Vegas other than the local Mormon stake houses that can make that claim.

Anyway, among the amenities at MGV are a VIP area with a cappuccino maker and leather couches. And the usual Vegas eye-candy hostesses, who, a manager assured The Times, are not just the usual bims from The Strip. Some of them are military veterans who are also models.

I went over to the MGV site to check it out, and found the full list of guns – handguns, semis, fully-auto – that you can use. And the packages – like World at War, Femme Fatale, Mob – that combine different guns and differing amounts of ammo and number of targets.

An interesting angle is that getting to shoot the real thing is drawing video game users. Video games used to tout that they were patterned on real guns. Now the guns at MGV have taglines like “as featured in Call of Duty.”

For The Mob package, you don’t get to shoot Moe Green in the eye – at least it doesn’t say if you can – but you do get 50 founds with a Thompson, 10 with a Pistol with suppressor, and 5 with a 12-gauge shotgun – plus tee-shirt – for $99.95.

Well, Bugsy Siegel should have lived to see this. I’m sure he’d be kicking himself that he didn’t think of it earlier.