Kansas exotic gun range lets you fire mega-weapons, blow stuff up

For most Americans, shooting a grenade launcher or anti-aircraft guns is the stuff of military service.

Not so in Kansas.

The Outback Park and Public Shooting Range, just outside of McPherson, has a whole array of exotic guns regular people can shoot for a fee – anything from a Ruger pistol to a 20-millimeter anti-tank gun.

The owner of the park, Chuck Harter, said the relatively rural location of his gun range lets him do essentially whatever he pleases.

“Everybody says, ‘I wish the (range) were closer to Wichita or to Salina,’ and I say ‘Why? We wouldn’t be able to do half the things we do out here in the boondocks if you’re close to town,’” Harter said. “Half the things we do will scare McPherson.”

Harter said people often seek out his gun range for “bachelor parties, birthday parties, divorce parties, mortgage-burnings, I-just-got-a-big-loan parties,” everything.

Since the range opened in 1997, he’s had guests from Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France and Italy stop in. Last fall, members of the Royal Canadian Air Force stopped by on consecutive weekends, while training in Wichita, he said.

“We have ... a lot of stuff you can’t just go anywhere and shoot,” Harter said.

Recently, Harter invited me up to the range to test out some of the guns he offers.

I thought this would be a particularly humorous endeavor, considering how I had very little experience shooting guns. But Harter says he’s had someone as young as 5 shoot one of these mammoth sniper rifles, so I should theoretically be able to do it too.

Here’s how it went:

I failed spectacularly at hitting the targets with a .22-caliber Ruger Mark IV, though I did feel somewhat James Bond-esque while doing so, because Harter had screwed a silencer on the end of the pistol.

Sniper rifles were a little more my forte, as I was 10/10 with a Savage .338 Lapua.

“Now for this next one, do you want an exploding target or a regular one?” Harter asked.

We all know there’s only one answer to that question.

So the staff of The Outback Park came out with a bag of explosives and had me mix it up. Now that’s something I never imagined doing.

I squared up behind the .338 Lapua sniper rifle and put the red bag of explosives in its crosshairs.

A squeeze of the trigger later, I was buffeted by both the deafening raport of the AR-50 going off, and the explosion I had detonated down range. Thank goodness for earplugs.

But that noise was nothing compared to shooting the range’s Anzio 20mm, a super-long-range anti-materiel rifle, used in the military as an anti-vehicle weapon. The thing was about as long as I was tall.

What was most interesting, though, was shooting a functional Civil War-era Gatling gun. The gun, which was manufactured in 1862, was brought out on wooden spoke wheels, and the ammunition was fed from the top of the gun. It was crank-operated and not accurate in the slightest – it was pretty crazy to feel how a soldier in the 1860s would have felt using this thing.

We also shot an M1919 Browning machine gun, which during World War II was typically mounted onto tanks and aircraft.

It’s just too bad the range was out of grenades for its 37mm grenade launcher. Now that would have been a blast.

This story was originally published July 20, 2017 at 11:38 AM with the headline "Kansas exotic gun range lets you fire mega-weapons, blow stuff up."