People travel for a lot of reasons, even within the overarching categories of “business or pleasure.” While many of us are familiar with traditions of getting away from the city for hunting or fishing trips, for many people outside of the United States, travel can mean access to something unknown back home: the firing range.
China, for example, has incredibly strict gun control laws. While that has resulted in firearms-related death rates that are a great deal lower than they are in the United States, it has also resulted in a trend of Chinese tourists coming to the U.S. to shoot.
“It’s a place Chinese can go to experience real gun culture,” said Dickson Wong, who arranges tours for groups of Chinese shooting enthusiasts to Florida, where they can go to firing ranges and enjoy their hobby. “It’s impossible to shoot here.”
It is estimated that tens of thousands of Chinese tourists come to the U.S. to shoot, something that they could never do at home, even if that isn’t the entire point of their trip. But the point of travel is generally to see or do something you can’t do at home, so this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, even though it might sound odd at first blush.
A 2008 law criminalized the ownership of even replica weapons in China. The result has been more Chinese leaving the country for hunting and shooting tours.
The United States has some of the laxest gun control laws in the world, as well as an estimated 300 million guns in circulation in the country. That means there are plenty of opportunities to shoot, at the range or in the woods, which can be hard to come by elsewhere. Honolulu gets a number of Japanese target shooters, who face much stricter laws back home, and Las Vegas has lots of gun clubs and shooting ranges which cater to foreign and domestic tourists.
Han Weitian of Beijing is one of Wong’s customers. He visited Wong’s club in Florida in May of 2016, and photos on social media show him firing an automatic rifle on an open range. “Chinese ranges fix their weapons to the bench,” he said. “This felt free, like real shooting.”
For savvy businesspeople like Wong, this is a niche market waiting to be tapped. He plans to open a club of his own in 2019, designed specifically to cater to Chinese guests.