Shoot Straight Sarasota opens Friday

After seeing the success at his Florida Gun Show held at the Bradenton Area Convention Center in Palmetto, Khaled Akkawi wanted to open a Shoot Straight location in Sarasota. The shooting range and firearms store he built at 2335 University Parkway opens to the public on Friday. It’s Akkawi’s eighth Shoot Straight location to open in Florida.

“We have built a clientele there,” Akkawi said. “We have thousands of customers in the Manatee-Sarasota area that have been doing business with us at gun shows.”

Akkawi hosts 43 gun shows every year in Florida.

“We have had a lot of people ask us over the years, ‘When are you going to open a store?’ ” said Jon Hall, Shoot Straight director of commercial operations and retail.

Shoot Straight opens months after a fatal shooting accident at another gun range, High Noon in Sarasota. In early July, William Brumby, 64, accidentally fired a gun while trying to remove a spent shell casing from the back of his shirt. The unintentional fire fatally struck his son, Stephen Brumby, 14.

Akkawi said the staff at Shoot Straight teaches and follows all National Rifle Association safety protocols because “safety is rule number one in all of my stores.”

“I hope it never happens anywhere,” Akkawi said of firearm accidents. “It’s unfortunate human error. You can train staff as much as you want but I don’t think the facility could have ever stopped that, I hate to say it.”

Staff are trained to, even at the height of busy times, assure safety comes before everything else.

“If the person coming to shoot has never shot a gun, my employees are instructed to, if they are super busy, to ask the customer to come back another time so we can send the instructor back free of charge to go through the basics and go through the basics of handling a gun,” Akkawi said. “It’s very basic but you need proper training.”

Under the name Shoot Straight Sarasota Holding Co. LLC, Akkawi purchased the 9.5-acre property in January 2015 for $1.5 million and built the 16,000-square-foot range and store, according to Manatee County property records. The Sarasota location employs approximately 15 people and the store is still hiring full- and part-time employees.

The range has 24 lanes for pistol and rifle shooting in a climate-controlled facility with a “state-of-the-art” air ventilation system, Akkawi said.

Shoot Straight, which is headquartered in Apopka, carries between 50 and 75 different manufacturers, Hall said, and can custom-order firearms.

This story was originally published September 29, 2016 at 1:29 PM with the headline "Shoot Straight Sarasota opens Friday."