Go get it. Tip the whole thing out — the main compartment, the side pockets, the little zipper one you forgot existed.
I can tell you roughly what’s on the table now, because it’s the same table in every house in America.
Four boxes of ammo in three calibers, two of them opened and one of them a brand you don’t remember buying. A set of muffs with a crack in the headband. Eleven foam earplugs, none of them in pairs. A cleaning kit still in the blister pack. A multi-tool. Six staples and a roll of masking tape. Some loose brass. A gun lock still in its plastic bag, from a gun you sold in 2019. A target with eight holes in it that you kept for reasons you could not now articulate.
What’s not on the table is more interesting.
The whole point of this exercise is that a range bag doesn’t get packed. It accretes. Nobody ever sat down and decided what goes in it — things went in after a range trip and then stayed, for years, and the bag you’re carrying is a sediment record of every Saturday since you bought it.
So here’s what should be in it, and I’d argue most of these are things you’d have wanted on a day you didn’t have them.
Eye and ear protection, twice. Not because you’ll break yours. Because somebody will come with you — your brother-in-law, your kid, the guy from work who finally said yes — and the single most common reason a first-timer has a bad day is borrowed muffs that don’t seal and a pair of cheap glasses that fog. Buy a decent spare set and keep them in the bag permanently. Electronic muffs if you can swing it, because being able to hear instruction is most of what a first range trip is.
A staple gun that works, and staples. The number of range trips degraded by target-hanging improvisation is higher than it should be.
A real first aid kit, and I mean the right kind. Band-aids are fine for the paper cuts, and a range needs the other thing: a tourniquet and a pressure bandage, and five minutes of having watched how they go on. This is the single item on the list most likely to never be used and most catastrophic to not have. Put it where you can reach it one-handed, not at the bottom under the ammo.
A permanent marker and a roll of target pasters. Marker to label magazines and write the date on a target you’re actually keeping. Pasters so a single target lasts the whole session instead of three.
A dowel rod or a squib rod. Cheap, dumb, lives in the bag forever. The day a bullet doesn’t make it out of the barrel, this is how you find out the cheap way instead of the expensive way.
Spare magazines, and the honest number of them. Most people bring two and spend the session loading. Bring five and shoot more.
A loader. Your thumb at sixty is not your thumb at thirty, and there is no dignity to be gained here. The little plastic ones cost almost nothing.
Snap caps. For the malfunction drills, and for proving an action is clear.
Water. More than you think, especially shooting outdoors in heat, and nobody packs it.
Now what comes out.
The three-caliber ammo situation, reduced to what you actually shoot. Dead or cracked hearing protection, in the trash rather than back in the bag. The lock from the gun you sold. The unopened cleaning kit — put it on the bench at home where cleaning actually happens, because it has never once been used in a parking lot.
And any magazine you’ve had a problem with. You know the one. It goes in the trash, not back in the rotation, which is the same argument I made on Monday and is worth making twice.
Twenty minutes, and the bag is a tool instead of a sediment layer.
The real tell on whether you did this right is simple. Could somebody else grab your bag on the way out the door, take a new shooter to the range, and have everything they need without stopping anywhere?
If yes, it’s packed. If no, it’s just a bag with your stuff in it.
