Shooting Range Is Aiming High

Eco-Friendly Training Center Includes Upscale Amenities

A shooting range and firearms training center opening this weekend in Ashburn is taking a country-club-like approach to the art of punching holes in paper with bullets.

Billed by its owners as the largest facility of its kind in the nation, the Silver Eagle Group Training Facility & Private Club has eco-friendly and technologically advanced shooting ranges with 50- and 25-yard fields that can accommodate rifles and pistols. Afterward, shooters can lounge at a coffee bar, work out on a treadmill or go online with wireless Internet service while waiting for a gunsmith to clean or fix a weapon.

The center also includes a "scenario area" the size of a college gymnasium, where military organizations and law enforcement agencies can train in elaborate settings designed to simulate a single-family home, residential neighborhood, office or school. Civilians can sign up for self-defense training on the course.

Scott M. Marquez, 32, president of Silver Eagle Group, said the center will fill a niche by serving upmarket gun enthusiasts. He developed the concept with help from his brother, Stephen, who served three tours with U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their father, Dario, a Northern Virginia businessman who had been a Secret Service agent in details assigned to presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

Marquez said there is a demand for high-quality shooting ranges and firearms-training centers in the region, which is heavily populated with current and former military and law enforcement personnel. About 36 percent of Virginia households have firearms, according to a 2005 survey published in the journal Pediatrics.

Marquez said he spent about two years traveling the country and researching other shooting ranges to find out what would work best.

Marquez said he knows the venture's timing is not the best, with the downturn in the economy. "All the same, we're not opening another golf club. Another golf club in this market is death," he said.

Marquez, who offered a tour of the center before construction was completed, said he is proudest of the high-tech and environmentally beneficial designs.

Each shooting bay has a computerized console that controls the targets downrange. An elaborate ventilation and filtration system creates slightly negative air pressure inside the shooting range and blows the air away from the shooters, carrying gun smoke and minute particles with it.

The range's backstop is made of high-grade steel plates angled together like an open maw. A film of green, biodegradable liquid flows over the plates to help slow the bullet and wash away minute lead fragments, channeling them into a trough where the slurry can be collected. The bullets are caught by a snail-shaped trap that absorbs their energy in its coils. After a bullet's velocity is expended, it drops onto a conveyor that deposits it in a steel drum for collection by a recycling company.

The center, in the Beaumeade Industrial Park off Waxpool Road, was scheduled to hold an open house from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. yesterday and today, with free training demonstrations and public tours.