National Rifle Association Releases Shooting Game

The National Rifle Association has released an iOS game called NRA: Practice Range. It’s a free target shooting app that features a variety of real guns. You can unlock more guns for a buck apiece via in-app purchase. The game’s release is surprising, because the video game industry is one of the groups the NRA has blamed for real-life violence.

NRA: Practice Range is a very barebones target practice app that lets you shoot in three modes: Indoor Range, Outdoor Range, and Skeet Shoot.
The controls are handled either using the gyroscope or an analog stick. Neither work well, leaving you with floaty-feeling controls. If you’re looking for a target practice game, you’d be much better off downloading something like Bullseye Factory or even Can Knockdown 2.

The loading screens are stocked with facts and tips like: “Gun Safety Tip #4: Know your target and what is behind it.”
There’s also an information section that sends you to the NRA website for pages related to gun safety, NRA news, and the like.
It’s ironic that the NRA has released a video game, because games– along with music videos and movies– are where the NRA has laid the blame for real-life violence. In a statement on the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut last month, NRA president Wayne LaPierre made the following statement:

And here’s another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal: There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people, through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse.