Tons of fun with guns

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LOWELL — Editor’s note: The Other Eight is a look at how people spend the remainder of their day, when they’re not sleeping or working.

SPRINGDALE - Jan Walker Bynum turned 50 this year. She had a birthday party and invited all her close friends and family.

When she had them all in one place, she went on a shooting spree. She unloaded a fully automatic MAC-10 machine gun, a snub-nosed Ruger revolver, a Sig Sauer 9mm.

People ate pizza and watched. Some loaded their own firearms. The only victim was a faceless man - really the shell of a man - an outline on thick paper stock with numbers in place of vital organs.

For the last year, Bynum has been frequenting Sturm’s Indoor Pistol Range, the kind of rare place where you can laydown your quarters for a Snickers bar while you’re fingering an Uzi. Owner Steve Sturm has big presses to repackage bullets, the 5.11 Tactical line of clothing for shooters and law enforcement, SureFire flashlights and one big black-brindled boxer named Pompeii. It’s an environment something like an indoor go-cart track crossed with a high-end munitions bazaar in Tora Bora.

Sturm is an avuncular fellow with firm opinions about our rights to carry guns and an electric-blue glare. He may be behind the counter, sighting in a rifle or polishing shotgun barrels.

Bynum is “an oddity” - her words. Judging by the reactions she gets from Sturm and fellow shooter Tommy Mathis, she’s more like a “novelty.”

“I am a girly-girl,” says Bynum, in a pink tank top stretched over the figureof a teenager. She occasionally packs a pink-gripped laser-sighted revolver in her waistband (don’t fear, she has a permit). “I grew up in ... the Keller Jogensen Studio dancing ballet and tap.

“Then the modeling biz.”

She pulls out some glossy glamour shots - in Western wear, in a sports outfit, in lingerie. In some she looks like Natalie Portman, in others Anne Archer, but “my bread and butter were my feet and my legs,” she says.

In Dallas in the early 1980s she and friend, Julie Cypert (now Roblee), were standins for the show of the same name, for Victoria Principal and Linda Gray.

“I lived every little girl’s dream. I ran with the jet set and the fast crowd,” she says. “I retired from that at the ripe old age of 30,” and moved home and broke into broadcast advertising, then wholesale furniture, where she is today.

A year ago, on a trip back to Dallas, somewhere amid those “six hours of windshield time,” she had a revelation - “Well, I better buy a gun while I still can.”

Then-Sen. Barack Obama was pulling away in the presidential race, and she was concerned gun rights would be rolled back, and “I’m just thinking, ‘People are crazy.The economy’s not good, and people are doing crazy things. I need to learn how to protect myself and my home.’”

The first time she shot, she was nervous. She sweated. Boom! She squealed. She wanted to go again.

“Oh, I got bit by the bug bad.”

In the last year, she’s come to own several guns, including a pink rifle. In the spring, she began attending tactical shooting competitions at Sturm’s on Tuesday nights - how to shoot from behind a rampart, how to hit a moving target, how to shoot with a baby in your arms.

Despite free pizza and free practice with a variety of rifles, shotguns and assault weapons, not everyone was thrilled with her choice of birthday party, but they all left with an intimate look into exactly how she’s spending her spare time these days.

The woman who admits she played with Barbies until the eighth grade now uses words like “entertaining,” “just fun” and “an adrenaline rush” to describe shooting, and if she can scrounge up a little positive “PR,” it’s not incidental. She’s aiming for it.

“Guns get a bad rap.”

Northwest Profile, Pages 42 on 10/18/2009

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