Gunning for the status quo
If—or when—the city shuts it down, San Francisco’s gun club (yes, there is one) will go out with a bang.
It’s a chilly summer day at Lake Merced. On a strip of concrete near the shore, a man in a vest and safety glasses nestles a shotgun into the small of his shoulder. He sights a clay disc lofted out over the lake and, a moment later, blows it apart. The air echoes with the dull clap of the gun.
Inside the worn, barrackslike clubhouse nearby, a few of the Pacific Rod and Gun Club’s 350 members drink coffee and discuss the past. Once upon a time, the 80-year-old club was a regular stopover for city pols and entertainment royalty: Ernest Hemingway shot here, as did actors Barbara Stanwyck and Rex Harrison. The stars are long gone, but the club remains a refuge.
“This place keeps me young,” says Walt Biondi, a lanky 90-year-old with a genial, Reagan-esque twinkle in his eyes. The son of a Calabrian teamster, Biondi was born in San Francisco and grew up with guns. As the club’s shooting instructor, he has schooled everyone from cops to former mayor Willie Brown. Biondi recently lost both his wife and his son; the club, he says, “is like my family.”
Biondi is worried about the club’s future worried about the club’s future. In 1999, a task force began paying attention to Lake Merced’s health, which had been declining for decades. The water was borderline toxic, its prized fish population was nearly wiped out, and the once stately boathouse had deteriorated so badly that most of it was condemned. The Public Utilities Commission was tapped to come up with a plan to restore the lake to good health and keep it that way. To that end, everything is up for reevaluation—gun club included.
Though the plan isn’t due until early next year, one item has been consistent throughout years of public meetings: Skeet shooting scored very low across the board for its potential environmental impact, its compatibility with other activities at the lake, and its overall popularity with users. That last conclusion might not be a surprise. After all, this is a city that voted to ban handguns in 2005—and while shotguns used for shooting skeet are vastly different from handguns used for killing people, most San Franciscans probably don’t make a distinction. “A lot of people have a hard time thinking of guns as something used for recreation, not for violence,” says Dee Dee Workman, former executive director of San Francisco Beautiful, a prime mover behind the restoration.
None of this has gone down well at the gun club. Fred Tautenhahn, a bullish ex-Marine in a Semper Fi jacket and black cowboy boots, has argued the club’s case at task-force meetings with martial fervor. He brushes off many of the complaints, such as those about noise. “If we’re gone, it’s not like the shooting will stop,” he says, pointing to the police range next door. “And they sometimes use machine guns.”
Ray Brooks, a 75-year-old club member who holds several national skeet-shooting records, isn’t happy either. But times have changed. “This used to be the countryside, just empty space,” he says, gesturing toward the surrounding hills, now studded with apartment blocks. Brooks appears in one of the oldest photos on the wall, as a seven-year-old sitting in the front row at a national shooting contest the club hosted in 1939.
The club has its defenders, such as a nearby apartment complex and the Chronicle’s editorial board, which has argued for a compromise. Whatever happens, the Pacific Rod and Gun Club won’t bow out quietly. “If we do get evicted, we won’t go with our tails between our legs,” Tautenhahn vows. “I’ve got plenty of ammunition—metaphorically speaking, of course.”—Chris Smith
