Local TV news does plenty of solid work covering armed citizens. But every gun owner has watched a local station try to gin up a scandal out of nothing — think of the breathless reports about volunteer fire departments raffling off a rifle, where one or two cranks get all the airtime.
The latest example plays out in Owings Mills, a Baltimore suburb where an upscale shooting facility called Guntry operates.
The “Controversy”
Guntry holds a contract that lets Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers train at the facility. Baltimore CBS affiliate WJZ decided that was worth a story, leading with tips from “concerned Guntry members” who said they dropped their memberships after learning about the ICE arrangement.
There’s a small problem with the outrage angle: the station couldn’t line up a single one of those members to sit for an on-camera gripe.
The would-be defectors preferred to stay anonymous. If you’re upset enough to cancel your membership and call a TV station, at least have the courage to say so on the record. Instead, they stayed anonymous — however many of them there actually are.
WJZ’s own government-records search buried the sharpest twist in the story. The Department of Homeland Security has paid Guntry’s parent company, Wolfland Inc., hundreds of thousands of dollars for firearms training at the facility since 2020. That means the contract predates the Trump administration, was signed and honored throughout the Biden years, and only became a “story” the moment ICE became a politically useful target for a local news package. Nothing about the training arrangement changed. The framing did.
The Only Guy Who Talked
The one member who did go on camera wasn’t bothered at all.
“We came just to do some target practice. One of my friend’s birthdays just passed, so we all met up here just to shoot some guns,” Guntry customer Fernando Escobar told WJZ. He said he had a great time.
Escobar doesn’t have a problem with ICE agents training where he trains.
“As a Hispanic male, people would probably say I shouldn’t support it, but at the end of the day, I’ve got to get my training in as well. So whether it’s a place that they train at or a place that they don’t, I still got to go,” Escobar said. He kept going: “They’re not coming here to go ahead and try to get people and deport them. They’re not coming to bother me. I’m alright. They gotta train somewhere, I’ve gotta train somewhere.”
That’s the whole thing in three sentences. WJZ also reached out to Guntry’s owner and to ICE for comment. Neither had responded at the time the story ran.
Training Is a Good Thing
Whatever you think about ICE’s presence in your community, we should all want law enforcement to actually get trigger time. The gun control crowd wants proof of instruction before you’re even allowed a firearm in your own house. So why is ICE training at a commercial range suddenly a scandal?
The contract itself, per WJZ, states that Guntry “is the only facility identified within a 30-mile radius of the field office that provides all required training capabilities at a single location.” If not there, then where? WJZ’s story doesn’t propose an answer, because there isn’t one that fits the outrage.
The Bigger Picture
The station and its anonymous tipsters tried hard. What they actually proved is that this is a non-issue for just about everyone who shows up to shoot — and that a routine federal training contract, unremarkable across two administrations, becomes “news” the moment a station thinks it can attach it to a politically flammable acronym. Baltimore-area gun owners have plenty of real fights on their hands — Maryland’s Bill 23-26 sensitive-places scheme is a live constitutional problem that’s already before federal court. Whether a private range hosts federal law enforcement isn’t in that category.
