- March 10, 2025
Greg Eckley has a stressful job. He sees 125 customers per week through his business, Professional Pool Service of Flagler County.
But after he leaves the shooting ranges at the Flagler County Gun Club, his stress is gone.
“It’s an amazing feeling,” Eckley said. “I go there with my son, and it’s a great way for us to bond. When we leave, we feel like there’s not a thing on our shoulders.”
Eckley has been around guns for as long as he can remember. He’s a former hunter, but now he’s an avid recreational shooter and gun collector. He keeps all his guns locked in a safe and started teaching his son, Eric, about safety when Eric was 8.
“It’s a hobby like anything else,” Eckley said. “You collect them for value. It’s just something you have, like people who collect cars.”
He said he wants to see stronger background checks for those who purchase guns, noting that at gun shows, he has seen people who seemed unstable purchase firearms without any check. But he doesn’t want to see any changes to his ability to shoot guns safely.
Steve Nobile, who owns HSDS Guns in Palm Coast, agrees. But he doesn’t agree with the entirety of President Barack Obama’s proposal for gun regulation.
A conversation has risen about banning what were first called assault weapons, a term that has since been nuanced to “military-style assault weapons.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced on Thursday a bill that would ban all military-style assault weapons. More than 150 semiautomatic weapons would be banned if the bill were passed.
“There is no ‘assault weapon’ category of gun,” Nobile said. “A gun is a gun. The minute I take a gun — any gun — and turn it against a person, it becomes an assault weapon.”
Once Obama began talking about changing regulations for weapons shortly after the shooting in Newtown, Conn., Nobile saw a spike in business. Guns and ammunition are selling faster than he can purchase them.
“It just opened a frenzy,” Nobile said. “People were afraid of losing their right to own a firearm and they started going from store to store trying to find a gun to buy. We’re empty. We’re buying guns in ones and twos wherever we can get them.”
Nobile supports finding a way to keep guns out of the hands of those who would abuse them — that’s why he supports changing the regulations for private sales of guns.
Doing this would require not only extending background checks to all purchasers of guns, whether the transaction occurs privately, at a gun show or in a gun store, but also creating some sort of database with which doctors can track those whose mental health issues could make them dangerous gun owners, Nobile said.
“When you do a background check in the store, it only takes a few minutes,” he said. “That will pull up felony charges and criminal records, but that’s it.”
He said he would support private individuals being able to appeal their classification as potentially unstable.
But regulation isn’t the end of the conversation.
“Violence is a cultural problem that must be addressed,” Nobile said. “We have to say, ‘Why is this happening? Why do we have college kids and high school kids going around and shooting each other? First, where are they getting the guns from? And second, what’s driving them to do this?"
NOTE: This one part in four about guns in Flagler County. Click here for the other three.
