“Where To Shoot” App Puts Shooting Opportunities in the Palm of Your Hand
WhereToShoot.Org bills itself as “North America’s most comprehensive directory of shooting ranges,” allowing site visitors to find shooting ranges near their location whether they’re at home or traveling. The free WhereToShoot app for smartphones and tablets (available for both Android and iOS) makes finding a place to shoot even more convenient.
The app is as simple to use as you might imagine. Tell it where you want to shoot and it gives you a list of shooting ranges within your specified distance. Click on a range and it gives you all of the pertinent details including the range address, telephone number, website address, range type, facility details and more. If you’re more of a visual person and you prefer to see your closest ranges shown on a map rather than in a list, there’s an option for that as well.
Not sure where you are? Not a problem. Enough smartphone and tablet apps these days make use of the device’s location services that it no longer seems like the magical feature that it once might have but it really works great in the Where To Shoot app. The app can figure out where you are and base the shooting range search results on that. The app also seamlessly integrates with the built-in mapping software on all of the devices we tested. Once a range is selected, it can be viewed on the in-app map, which provides the option to use the devices native map to provide turn-by-turn directions from your current location to the shooting range.
Other welcome integrations between the app and the device are the ability to add the range information directly to your contact list, click the telephone number to call the range and send the range information and an invite to go shooting via your device’s email client.
The Where To Shoot app found all of the local ranges that we know about and displayed them correctly. We thought that we had found something to complain about when we were searching for a range that GunLink staff used to frequent and it didn’t show up. It turns out that the app is more up to date than we are since, after doing some research, we found out that our former go-to range is no longer in operation. However, mistakes do happen and if you find one the app makes it easy to report errors. If you are a range operator or representative and don’t see your range listed in the results, while the website version offers an opportunity to list or update your range information, this feature seems to be lacking from the app.
In addition to allowing users to locate shooting ranges, the app also includes several other features such as the videos section, which embeds the NSSF YouTube channel into the app, an RSS feed of shooting-related news and a 10-item list of firearm safety rules.
The GunLink crew is pretty well set in our ways and we usually get our trigger time in at local ranges where we hold memberships, so we don’t often seek out new places to shoot. However, if you’re not so committed to your usual shooting spot or if you’re traveling and want to burn some powder, this app would be a great addition to your device. Find the app for your device in the Google Play Store or iTunes Store.