Shirts for a Saturday at the Range

A range bag gets packed the same way every time. Eye protection, hearing protection, ammunition, targets, tape, and a shirt. The first two are not decoration, so they come first here too.

Glasses and muffs, then everything else

The National Shooting Sports Foundation states it in one line: all shooters should wear protective shooting glasses and some form of hearing protectors while shooting. Glasses catch ejected brass, unburned powder, a clay chip and the rare case failure. Hearing loss from gunfire accumulates and does not come back, which is the argument for muffs on a quiet afternoon as well as a crowded one.

The rest of the list is short and every club posts it near the door. Keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction at all times. Firearms stay unloaded when they are not actually in use. Be sure of your target and what lies beyond it. Never rely on a mechanical safety. A cease fire is obeyed the second it is called, and nobody touches a firearm while anyone is downrange. Everything below this paragraph is much less important than everything above it.

The ones about the routine

The Eat Sleep Shoot Repeat, Pistol Silhouette Tee is the closest thing here to a club uniform. Four elements stack down the chest in white block capitals, except that the third word is missing: in its place stands a solid white pistol silhouette, muzzle to the right, with the rear sight, the cocking serrations and the magazine baseplate readable inside one flat shape. Your eye reads a picture in the middle of a sentence without stumbling. The joke is about the person who books the same lane every week and keeps a log, a routine the shirt admits to rather than dresses up.

The Monday to Sunday, One Gun for Each Day of the Week is laid out like a wall chart, three rows deep, each firearm drawn in color with its day named underneath. Four across the top, two in the middle, and the whole bottom row given to Sunday. The escalation is real and it is drawn, not implied: Monday is a rimfire target pistol and Sunday is a bolt action rifle with a scope, a bipod down on its legs and a heavy muzzle brake. People stand in front of it and read all seven.

The ones about the joke

The I Love the Smell of Gunpowder in the Morning Tee is pure typography in military stencil lettering, four lines alternating between white type on black and black type knocked out of white bars. The trick is in the first line, where the L of LOVE is not a letter but a pistol stood on end, barrel up to make the upright, grip along the bottom to make the foot. It rewrites the best known line of Apocalypse Now, the 1979 war film, with gunpowder in place of the word in the original, which is why nobody at the sign in table needs it explained.

The I Have a Target on My Back, Red and Cream Print carries no illustration whatsoever, and that is the design. Three lines of heavy capitals: I HAVE A in a warm cream, then TARGET half again as tall and in hard red, then ON MY BACK in cream and stretched wider than the red word above it. There is no bullseye and no crosshair. One colored word does all the work, which keeps the shirt wearable at the club and at the office in the same week.

The French Range Joke Tee, Not the Punchiest Primer is the one that stops the room, because it is in French. Three lines of white brush capitals read T’es pas l’amorce la plus percutante de la boite. An amorce is the primer, the small cup of compound that the firing pin crushes to set the powder off, and percutante shares a root with percuteur, the French word for firing pin. So the sentence lands somewhere between not the sharpest tool in the shed and a round that will not go off. It is what somebody buys for the friend who misses the plate twice and blames the wind both times.

The one with no words at all

The Skull Built From Cartridges and Brass Casings Tee works at two distances and that is unusual. From across a room it is a skull, front on, filling the chest. Up close it dissolves into hundreds of cartridge cases seen from the base, in brass gold, nickel silver and gunmetal gray, packed tighter toward the edges to follow the curve of the cranium. The eye sockets and the nasal opening are bare shirt, which is what gives the face its depth, and the teeth are full cartridges stood on end. No text anywhere.

All six live in Shooting Sports and Airsoft, and every design in the shop is printed and shipped by Amazon.

Questions people ask

What do I actually need the first time I go to a range?

Eye protection and hearing protection, and most ranges rent or sell both at the counter if you arrive without them. Everything else is usually available on site. Read the posted rules before you open a case, since each club runs its line slightly differently.

Can any of these be worn away from the range?

The target on my back design is the one to reach for. It has no firearm drawn on it, just three lines of type, so it reads as a joke about the wearer. The cartridge skull is the other candidate, since at conversation distance most people see a skull and nothing else.

What does the French shirt actually say?

Word for word, you are not the most percussive primer in the box. In practice it is the French way of telling a friend he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, built from range vocabulary so that shooters hear the second meaning and everyone else hears the first.