Riga For Guns

We are driven to the range by men who tell us stories centered around (or somehow involving) tourist death. We have a guide now who we originally thought was a prostitute on account of the various types of red material that make up her outfit. She tells us that a Western European man was either recently killed or recently killed himself at the range, and although we ask how, expecting answers, she doesn’t know the details and shrugs her shoulders, as if to say, “it happens,” or “don’t worry, it’ll probably be OK.” She seems bored or is simply thinking about something else.

Down a flight of concrete stairs, through a door so thick it takes at least two seconds to walk its full depth – the sort of door reserved for films sets to do with nuclear war or bank robberies (pre-digital times, when money really was money, not ‘data’). We’re approximately three meters below ground, standing in a small room in which things for sale look like and are presented in a similar way to fishing equipment: bullets, knives, bayonets (bayonets!) laid out flat beneath layers of glass. Posters on walls feature guns, naked women, naked women holding guns. In one poster, a half-naked woman sits next to a leopard. Another poster’s slogan reads: “It’s not your mama’s gear.” A smaller poster on the wall advertises “Eye Zone Skin Care Balm” and has the strapline: “The Amber of Latvian Biocosmetics.”

We are taken into another room for a safety briefing, which means we are handed pieces of laminated paper and told to read. The text is printed entirely in Latvian, apart from one line in English which mentions ‘liability’. The weather below ground is mild, although mild means a different thing here to anywhere else and requires three coats, not one. The fact that we cannot feel the ends of our fingers does not seem conducive to accuracy.

The briefing is over, quickly, as if safety is of little/no importance. On the way to our range, the guide tells us that this is where the police practice. They are in Range 3, now, firing at what, in real life, will be people, she says. Range 3 is the only range you access through a glass door and, consequently, the only range you can peer into. Inside are three policemen shooting simultaneously at different targets. In the way they shoot – with aggression and, despite the dark, with insane precision – the policemen give the impression that they are pro-death in situations requiring action beyond the verbal. Sometimes they stop, re-load, swap positions, begin shooting again. We watch the cycle a couple or three more times before each being given ear protectors.