‘GUN TOURISM’ BOOMS IN U.S.
In firearms-restricted countries like China, enthusiasts are coming here to lock and load
Brad Whitehead of Manchester, England, opens up with a fully automatic machine gun at Machine Guns Vegas shooting range in Las Vegas.
BEIJING Dickson Wong, a marksman with a deep interest in firearms, arranges tours for groups of Chinese gun enthusiasts to travel to DeSoto County, Fla., so they can shoot at firing ranges.
That’s a long way to travel for target practice, but it’s exceedingly difficult to do that here in China, where restrictions on firearms are so severe that even possession of air rifles or toy guns can land you in jail for years.
“It’s a place Chinese can go to experience real gun culture,” said Wong, 38. “It’s impossible to shoot here.”
Wong estimates that tens of thousands of wealthy Chinese travel to the U.S. every year to shoot, and he aims to capture some of that demand when he opens his own state-of-the-art gun club in 2019.
He hopes to draw 5,000 Chinese tourists a year to his club with luxury accommodations and Chinese-speaking instructors. A promotional video for the club highlights sumptuous steaks, open-air firing ranges and a wide selection of weapons.
Gun tourism already is a growing business in the U.S. because of lax laws regulating firearms when compared with other countries. Honolulu attracts target shooters
from Japan, which has stringent gun-control laws, and Las Vegas has many firing ranges available for domestic and foreign visitors.
Wong has the closest thing to a gun shop in Beijing. It has camouflage gear, holsters and T-shirts quoting the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms. What’s missing are the arms, which are illegal to manufacture or sell in China for private use.
Although weapons laws in China date back to the third century B.C., China was awash in firearms when the communists came to power in 1949, the result of resistance to Japanese occupation and a protracted civil war. The government confiscated some arms in urban areas but allowed farmers to keep two rifles for hunting.
Tighter controls were later imposed but were largely ignored. After pro-democracy demonstrations on Tiananmen Square were crushed in 1989, the government moved to toughen enforcement, and in 1996 it passed a law that formally banned citizens from owning guns.
In 2008, just months before the national shooting team cleaned up at the Beijing Olympics, the rules were widened to include further restrictions on replica weapons. Possession of a firearm can carry a prison sentence of up to seven years.
Even so, sales of replica arms are soaring, and websites like “Armshead” and “Ironblood” allow people to trade gun-related news and images, police say. Also, criminals are using guns more, especially those involved in the drug trade in the south, Chinese news media report.
Over the past few years, there has been a spate of cases in which people have been jailed for owning guns they thought were toys. A former solider in northeast China was held in 2016 for six months because police discovered he had five air rifles in a collection of military models he started when he was a boy. He’s facing trial. In August 2015, an 18year-old in southeastern China got life in jail for ordering 24 imitation guns from Taiwan; 20 guns turned out to be real, according to the South China Morning Post. He has since been told his sentence would be commuted.
China’s government defends strict gun laws to guarantee public safety, but critics say the real reason is to prevent rebellions.
“The Chinese government took away people’s guns to prevent them rising up,” said Zhou Xiaozheng of Renmin University. “Do you think they would be able to demolish peoples’ homes if they hadn’t?” he said, referring to the government’s broad right to seize private property.
The Chinese government publicizes mass shootings in the U.S., where there are an estimated 300 million firearms, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The USA “is a place Chinese can go to experience real gun culture. It’s impossible to shoot here.” Dickson Wong, a marksman in China who arranges group tours to Florida
There are no official figures for gun-related deaths in China, but media reported only 25 last year. In the U.S., annual firearms-related deaths exceeded 33,000 in 2013, the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
China’s 2008 law restricting replica weapons “had the effect of criminalizing harmless behavior, of putting people who present no threat to society in jail,” said Deng Xueping, a Shanghai lawyer who specializes in gun cases.
The result has been more Chinese going overseas to shoot.
Han Weitian, 33, of Beijing visited Wong’s club in Florida last May. Pictures on social media show him firing an automatic rifle on an open range.
“Chinese ranges fix their weapons to the bench,” Weitian said. “This felt free, like real shooting.”