BORELLI CONSULTING: Recreational Equipment Reviews

N-Range Home Shooting System
13 March 2006

So, you DON'T own enough acreage to have your own pistol or rifle range. So you DON'T live next door to a range that will let you shoot for free. Are you one of those people who would happily shoot every day if you could? How about if you could do it safely in your basement or garage? (and I'm not talking about AirSoft). On the last day of SHOT Show, walking through the tent setup outside to hold the spill-over exhibitors, I found a booth for N-Range. It was Sunday morning and a lot of folks were grumpy. It had been a long week for exhibitors. But the woman working the N-Range booth was smiling and looking wide-awake (neither of those statements applied to me), and the system looked interesting so I wandered over. What I found was a simply conversion you can make to your handgun OR LONG GUN, that allows you to shoot safely in restricted ranges and without the mandate for ear protection.

As you can see from the photos above and the one to the right, the N-Range Home Shooting System delivers a safe way to train with your converted handgun or long gun. With most handguns the only conversion required is a change of the barrel. With others, a little more work has to be done, but none of it requires a gunsmith, or anything you yourself can't do. I converted a Glock 17 in just a few minutes. Converting an AR-style rifle takes even less time. All you have to do is change the bolt.

If you take a look at the systems as shown, you can see that there are two variations:

The N-Range P/R 2000 includes:
- Shell Catcher Unit (important to catch ejected brass)
- Conversion parts
- Target Box (backstop)
- Protective Eyewear (they're safety conscious and that's a good thing)
- Targets
- Target Inserts (cardboard part)
- 2000 rounds of ammunition
- Instructional DVD.

Yes, you read that right: 2000 rounds of the N-Range ammo. Notice that no hearing protection is provided. Why? Becuase it's not required. I fired several magazines of both the handgun and rifle N-Range ammo and it's quieter than a cap gun.

The P/R 2000 Executive System replaces the Target Box unit with a custom built real wood cabinet with a built-in safe. All other items in the P/R 2000 are included. I honestly wish I had room in my office for one of these. In fact, my only problem with the N-Range Home Shooting System is that I don't have a garage or basement to put one in!

Without getting into too much detail, the N-Range system allows you to use your own handgun or long gun, safely converted, to fire their proprietary ammo. The ammo uses a system of primers, but no gunpowder or chemical propellant, to fire the projectile. The barrel conversions for handguns is designed so that, when installed, no LIVE ammo can be chambered. Due to the design, if you attempt to fire a live round, the slide will stay so far out of battery as to be unable to fire. With the long gun bolt converstion, the ammo is fired by a rimfire primer. So even if you do load live ammo into it, the firing pin hits the edge of the round and not the primer - so it won't fire. The simplicity of the safety mechanisms are quite ingenious.

With a base price of $2,500 that includes the weapon conversion (handguns) and that 2,000 rounds of ammunition, you can shoot in your own home for about $1.25 per shot. When I compare that to going to the range, I have to add up all the usually ignored costs to figure out a "per round" cost. Let's see...

There's the cost of the ammo: about $10 for 50 rounds of 9mm, times four boxes (usually to go shooting) so about $40.

There's the cost of the range: $20 per hour for about two hours or $40..

There's the cost of the targets: $0.25 per (B27 at my local range) and I usually go through four or five of them (at least), so that's another $1.00 or so.

The range (for me) is about 45 miles up the road, so it's about a 90 mile round trip. Divided by the 18 MPG my Jeep gets, and that's five gallons of gas at today's $2.35 per gallon, or $11.75 worth of gas.

Doing the math, I see that it costs me about $95 to go shoot 200 rounds of ammo at the range - not to mention the one hour of drive time up and the one hour of drive time back - so it's four hours out of my day to shoot for two hours. What's the value of YOUR time? If I bill that time at a secondary employment rate... say $25 per hour... that's another $50 of value added to the shooting day for a total of $145.

How did we compare? The N-Range Home Shooting System which gives me everything I need to shoot at home (except the gun itself) is $2,500. That includes the cost of the target box, brass catcher and conversion kit. When you take the cost of all that out, you're left with about $1,300 in cost for the 2,000 rounds of ammo. It might seem alot BUT....

My two hours of shooting, at $145 for 200 rounds, costs $0.73 per round (give or take a half cent). The N-Range ammo is less than that at $0.65 per round (give or take a half cent). So once you've purchased the basic shooting system, round for round you're SAVING money by shooting AT HOME. How do you beat that?

To learn more about the N-Range Home Shooting system, visit them online at http://www.nrange.com.

I have a comment on this article.

Don't forget to check out our Tactical Equipment Review about the Neil Roberts Warrior Knife as we've now tested, used and abused it as well!

This week's training article about the Isbella deBethencourt Memorial Cops4Kids Match Against Cancer.

For a listing of all reviews in chronological order, GO HERE.

New American Truth eMagazine
Dedicated to ALL citizens who oppose terrorism and injustice.
Subscribe Today!

Subscribe To New American Truth