Kyle Hay thought he had no one to save.
In his hands was a 9-millimeter carbine. In front of him was a labyrinth of targets and corridors he’d have to maneuver through as part of the firearms training course he hoped would add something to his life beyond the mundane day-to-day. He shifted his weight. An instructor, trying to provide direction, asked his question again:
Who in this scenario are you fighting to rescue? Your wife? Girlfriend?
Mr. Hay, 37, had spent his adult life wrestling with some version of that question: Who, or what, in his life was worth risking it all for?
After nearly a decade working as an occupational therapist, a divorce, cross-country moves and hobbies that offered only fleeting escapes from his day job, Mr. Hay was reckoning with how to define himself as he approached middle age. That’s how he found himself, carbine in hand, racking his brain to think of a human he would be desperate to save in this fictional scenario.
Quiet, with an easygoing gait and a mop of brown hair tucked under a ball cap, Mr. Hay stood just inside the entrance of a shoot house, a live-fire range modeled after a home. The exercise would train participants on what to do in case they confronted an armed intruder — an existential worry on the minds of those who had signed up. It was the final day of a rifle course at Thunder Ranch, a firearms skills training outfit in eastern Oregon. The sun was out and snow melted on the surrounding hills. Spotted clouds touched the horizon.
Thunder Ranch is where you go to understand close combat with a rifle. But after three days and close to 1,000 spent rounds of ammunition, it was clear that for Mr. Hay, shooting was less of an educational opportunity and more of a realization that he still needed something more.
“In the last year that feeling has been creeping in,” he said. “I’m realizing it ain’t the setting, it ain’t the state. It’s just me.”
Confronting the Reality of Violence
Set at the edge of the Fremont National Forest among plateaus and sagebrush, not quite halfway between Portland and Reno, Thunder Ranch occupies a special place in the pantheon of firearms education in American gun culture. Clint Smith, the ranch’s founder, has reached a level of celebrity in the gun community through popular YouTube videos, a book and more than a half-century of expertise that sets Thunder Ranch apart from traditional shooting courses. It has been called “Disneyland for men.”
Mr. Smith, a gruff-talking Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and a former police officer, opened Thunder Ranch in 1993, before YouTube and bargain-bin training DVDs showed civilians how to shoot. He went out of his way to illustrate the reality of violence, especially when it came to self-defense.
It was that kind of no-nonsense message that brought Mr. Hay more than three hours from his home in western Oregon with his Subaru and camping gear to take Thunder Ranch’s flagship class: Urban Rifle 1. For those seeking a sense of direction, learning how to defend yourself and your loved ones, if you have some, can satisfy something deep within the basal ganglia even when everything else feels adrift.
After settling in at his camp ground on the outskirts of Lakeview, a lumber town with a modest population of around 2,500 people, Mr. Hay inspected his gear: tan combat boots, small first aid kit, magazine belt and the main tool of Urban Rifle 1 — his AR-15.
“I’m not going to say I’m a doomsday prepper,” he said. “But I think it’s important as American citizens to know how to implement these skills.”
Thunder Ranch, with 877 acres of shooting ranges and rolling hills of pine, is off a state highway marked by an inconspicuous mailbox 10 minutes outside of town. After passing under a covered bridge and turning onto a dirt road toward the range, you’re greeted with a white and black sign: Welcome to Thunder Ranch This is Not a Gun Free Zone.
On the first day of the course, around 9 a.m., the dozen or so students of Urban Rifle 1 introduced themselves. The group congregated around a modest conference table wearing name tags, sunscreen and varying degrees of tactical apparel. Mostly they came from across the American West. In addition to transportation and lodging, the course costs around $2,000, less if you bring your own ammo.
Many shooting classes in the United States tend to focus on core firearms skills like gun safety and the basics of marksmanship. But they can also act as a Rorschach test of sorts as students like Mr. Hay try to gain insight into their own lives. At Thunder Ranch, participants leave behind their professional identities to live in a reality where violence is an important part of their personal puzzle. How they respond to it can give them a sense of what they’re made of, who they are.
Alongside Mr. Hay were a father and son from Houston who worked together in finance and had nearly matching AR-15 rifles. A distributor of windows and cabinets from the Seattle area had a “Punisher” skull on his rifle, a problematic image given the symbol’s association with extremism in some cases. This man shouted expletives at the cardboard targets after he shot them (he was quickly corrected by the instructors for both the yelling and the skull motif).
One of the two women in the course, a retired administrator for a firearms company, said that she had a choice of a week in Cancun, Mexico, with her husband, or three days at Thunder Ranch. She chose cardboard targets over Mayan ruins.
When the students were asked if there were any veterans in the class, Mr. Hay, who had enlisted in the Marines in 2007 when he was 19, remained quiet.
Mr. Hay graduated boot camp and completed his training as a radio operator, only to arrive at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and break his right ankle three weeks later. He spent months in rehabilitation and surgery in South Carolina and voluntarily left the service soon after because of his injury.
“It is one of my regrets,” he said of spending less than a year in the Marines. “It felt like I had failed at something.”
His decision to leave the military — opting out of what he saw as a life of adventure and growth — gnawed at Mr. Hay. He graduated from college with an associate degree and started a career in occupational therapy, following the path his parents took. After he broke his ankle in the Marines, the work seemed admirable: His therapists at Naval Hospital Beaufort were inspiring.
But in 2023, after a divorce and burning out in various occupational therapy roles, including home care, he moved to western Oregon.
“It was my first restart, like a hard reset,” he said. “Just got rid of everything and I packed my car up and came out here.”
On the first day, the class instructor and director of training, a former career police officer named Jack Daniel, went through a three-page handout detailing the course. In a nod to the fierce pace and the proficiency the students were expected to demonstrate with their rifles, Mr. Daniel, flanked by American flags and AR-15s, assured them that by the end of the three days, they’d be “running around with our hair on fire.”
Afterward, Mr. Hay and his classmates trudged with their rifles up a hill bracketed by pine trees and enveloped by the smell of sap. The shooting range was covered in gravel, with cardboard and steel targets at one end and the cement shoot house known as “The Terminator” at the other. Mr. Hay faced cardboard silhouette No. 7, and for the next few days and countless drills, he would fire hundreds of rounds of ammunition into the man-shaped cutout.
The three instructors, Mr. Daniel, Colton Miller and Brandon Amaya, were experienced shooters. Mr. Daniel and Mr. Amaya were law enforcement officers. Their tone was professional (“We don’t do politics here”). They took turns in front of the students, preaching lessons from their time in the field and on the range.
To Mr. Hay, the instructors embodied the type of drive or commitment that he might have gained from time in the Marines if he had stayed in, or if he had picked a career outside of occupational therapy.
“I envy their lifestyle,” Mr. Hay said of the instructors. “I envy it because you can tell that those guys get true passion in what they’re doing, it means something to them. I’m jealous of that. I’ve never found something like that in my life.”
Mr. Hay bought his first guns — a Colt AR-15 and a 12-gauge shotgun — when he was in his early 20s. After he left the military, shooting guns for fun became “a self development” exercise, he said, and an important pursuit outside of work. He watched as occupational therapy became less about helping people and more about the “vicious billing cycles” grinding away at his patients, he said. Shooting was time spent in nature, away from people, where he could hone his skills, much as he did when lifting weights at the gym or practicing martial arts.
“It’s very helpful at the moment, but I would not say it addresses the overall issue in my life,” he said, referring to his listlessness and lack of satisfaction during this chapter. He said he was close to “the point of no return,” where he no longer felt like a young man and dreams he once had would soon be out of reach.
Self-defense, a key line of instruction at Thunder Ranch, had also become important to him. Mr. Hay grew up in New Orleans and experienced the lawlessness that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and turned his hometown into a “free fire zone,” he said.
“In my younger life, I didn’t feel confident in my own abilities to defend or take care of myself,” he said.
‘There Has to Be Something Better’
On the last day of class, Mr. Hay sat at the counter of Tall Town Cafe & Bakery in Lakeview, a tidy breakfast spot with posters of the actors John Wayne and Clint Eastwood on the walls. He was pensive, parsing through the last two days of shooting, the coming long drive home and, of course, whatever the future might hold.
His hobbies, whether shooting or spending time outdoors, weren’t enough to balance the frustrations of his profession, and he grappled with a growing feeling of futility. Perched on a stool after ordering a breakfast burrito, he said that if he didn’t pull himself out of this funk in the next few months, he would try to join the U.S. Navy as an officer or the French Foreign Legion, a military unit famous as a haven for wayward men.
“I think I’m done trying to find fulfillment on nights and weekends,” Mr. Hay said of his litany of hobbies and failed relationships.
“There has to be something better than waking up every goddamn day and feeling like you’re doing nothing,” he said.
As Mr. Hay lamented, a pinup of Mr. Eastwood as the fictional dirt farmer turned outlaw Josey Wales stared at his back. The 1976 film set during the American Civil War saw Mr. Eastwood’s character on a search for redemption with two revolvers pinned on his chest.
A few hours later, Mr. Hay was standing at the mouth of the shoot house for the final exercise, his carbine in hand. Soon he would push forward, slowly maneuvering through wooden doorways and around tables. Finally he would turn a corner and shoulder his weapon — and blast a paper target full of enough holes that it fell to the floor. Yet he found no answers in the report of the gun.
“Who’s your person?” Mr. Amaya, the instructor, asked. “You got a wife? You got kids?”
Mr. Hay paused.
“It’s just me,” he said.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a national correspondent for The Times, covering gun culture and policy.
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