In August 2022, in the Northwest Woods of East Hampton, New York, three workers were repairing a pool deck when a bullet whizzed past them, striking the cedar-shingled roof of their client’s $3 million home.
The near-fatal incident was not the first time a bullet had struck a house on Merchants Path, a quiet residential road where residences regularly sell in the mid–seven figures. In fact, eight such incidents—including bullet holes found in ceilings, walls, and window screens—have been reported by homeowners since 2004.
An investigation by the East Hampton Town Police concluded with “a great probability” that the errant .30-caliber bullet had traveled a mile west from the rifle range at the Maidstone Gun Club. The subsequent furor has kept the club shuttered ever since, and a lawsuit brought by seven residents of Merchants Path is demanding its permanent closure. Despite the ongoing litigation, the club seems set to reopen upon signing a new lease with the Town of East Hampton.
With a reported 1,000-plus members, the gun club’s popularity may be surprising to those who only know “the Hamptons” as a hedgerowed vacationland for Manhattan’s 0.1 percent. But the club, which has operated in the Northwest Woods since the mid-1980s, pre-dates most of the multi-million-dollar homes now surrounding it. Its Web site bills it as “a low cost shooting facility for the common man.” Dues are $150 a year.
It can afford to offer such low dues partly because, for the past 30 years, East Hampton Town has charged the club just $100 in annual rent for 97 acres of highly prized municipal land. As part of the original lease agreement, the club allowed town personnel—chiefly the police—use of the club for free. It offered indoor and outdoor shooting facilities, including a rifle range with covered shooting positions, skeet and trap fields, a clay-shooting field, an international trap field, indoor and outdoor pistol ranges, and an archery range.
Though the Northwest Woods still features plenty of nature trails and preserves, and although there is some deer and small-game hunting during the relevant seasons, it’s a far cry from the hunter’s Eden that older locals describe as existing here up until the 1980s. In addition to the East Hampton Airport (in recent years, a focus of local resistance to the pollution, noise, and disruption caused by private jets), the gun club’s environs now include over 90 homes, businesses, and schools, including a pre-school less than a mile away. No wonder it’s become a flash point for locals’ long-standing frustrations over the area’s unchecked development.
The lawsuit describes the homeowners’ lives and property as being “at serious and near-constant risk of a bullet strike,” accusing the club of consistently ignoring its duty to protect public safety and deeming its permanent closure “the only one possible solution.” The plaintiffs, all of whom reside within a mile of the club, include the C.E.O. of New York–Presbyterian Hospital and a former E.P.A. adviser whose Asian-inspired garden showcases more than 80 species of moss.
But the club has denied the residents’ allegations of negligence and public endangerment, which focus on the effectiveness of the large concrete tubes into which members discharge their weapons at the outdoor rifle range. Club officials have suggested that the stray bullets hitting houses may have come from illegal shooting in the “nearly one thousand acres surrounding the gun club’s property.”
“Safety is paramount [at the range],” Rick Chiorando, a digital-marketing executive and member of the club, tells AIR MAIL. “ It would take a magic bullet to get there and hit that location shooting through those tubes.”
The club’s director, Ryan Horn, echoed Chiorando’s statement: “We have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on range improvements to guard against accusations no firearms expert would find credible,” he says.
On social media, conspiracy theories, including baseless claims of self-inflicted gun damage, abound. “They shoot their own house and blame the club. No way a stray hits them! More liberal city fucks ruining EH,” one commenter wrote on a local news outlet’s Instagram post about the lawsuit. “I’ll take shit that never happened for 500 Alex,” piped another.
An East Hampton Town Police investigation, however, found that it most likely did, deeming the club’s safety system “degraded, inadequate, and poorly maintained.” The club’s surveillance footage from the time of the incident showed two men firing assault-style rifles; one of the men, who was shooting standing up in violation of the club rules, struggled to control his weapon.
An East Hamptonite since 1957, Barry Raebeck heads the Coalition to Transform East Hampton Airport. He views the gun club and the airport as twin cases of “an entitled few endangering the public welfare.” Raebeck says both entities—one used by billionaires, the other by blue-collar workers—pose a threat not only to residents, schoolchildren, hikers, and bikers but also to air, soil, and groundwater quality. Though the club’s own soil testing concluded that lead levels did not present any danger to the local water table—and Horn boasts of the club following an Environmental Stewardship Plan “that goes beyond the terms of our lease, or the law”—the results of court-ordered testing have not yet been made public.
Neither has the new lease, which is rumored to contain a provision making the gun club responsible for any lead remediation that may be needed. “They’re gonna clean up their own crime scene?” asks Raebeck. “These guys don’t even have any money. They’re in the red.”
According to its 2023 tax returns, the Maidstone Gun Club was operating at a $161,000 loss. But the club insists that it is now “in a strong financial position with a healthy reserve fund and absolutely no debt,” adding that “members have stepped up in a big way and we have considerable insurance coverage.”
Nevertheless, many residents and even some gun-club members, think it likely that the club’s rent will go up from $100 to something more in line with the town’s other tenants, such as the nearby Country School, which, as of 2022, pays the town $18,000 a year in rent and improvement taxes to lease just a couple of acres of public land. (Horn denies the rent is low, stating that it is “in line with what local municipalities charged non-profits who are stewards of public property.”)
The town blew off a proposal by Raebeck to convert the land into open space for outdoor recreation, and ignored a proposal by Kirby Marcantonio, the co-founder of Whalebone Workforce Housing, to build 20 affordable houses on the site for essential workers. Baffled by the town’s decision to lease the club a plot the size of 74 football fields, Marcantonio asks why the gun club could not exist “on 10 or 20 or 30 acres, which would be sufficient for their use, safe for the community, and, more importantly, deliver land that is so scarce around here?” He views the housing crisis—which has lately forced migrant workers to live in the woods—as an “existential threat” to his community.
Such arguments carry little weight with Horn. “If someone is unhappy with the Club operating on its current acreage, why would they think reducing the buffer zone by two-thirds is a good idea?” he says. “How would moving residents of the new affordable housing closer to the airport and gun club be better for noise, safety, and the environment?”
Ironically, it’s the gun club’s clientele who would benefit the most from Marcantonio’s rejected plan. Many are East Hampton Town employees who can no longer afford to live in the area and must spend hours every day stuck in the “trade parade”—the daily traffic jam of tradespeople—driving to and from the East End. Although there’s at least one member who does not fit that mold: metal magnate Andrew Sabin, a Republican mega-donor and resident of Amagansett. With deep pockets on both sides, this face-off could become as never-ending as that surrounding the airport.
The Town of East Hampton would not provide AIR MAIL with a time estimate or the specific terms of the gun club’s new lease, but it did say that “changes are anticipated, including the removal of the outdoor rifle range.” But even if the bullets stop, the battle for East Hampton’s soul seems set to continue.
Carrie Monahan is a Brooklyn-based writer and producer
