Sal's Angus Grill in Stillwater is the kind of bar I’m partial to, honest and laid-back, with friendly service, wood paneling, and a promise of “down home cookin’.” A merry cartoon bull swilling a martini—Sal, presumably—presides over the affair.
But it wasn’t the food that drew me to Sal’s on this sunny October Sunday afternoon, or the atmosphere. I’m here to play gun bingo.
And so are a lot of other folks. As the Vikings eke out a win over the Jets in London, tables start to fill up with hopeful firearms enthusiasts eager to fork over their $60 (cash only) to play 10 games. Before long, every seat in the place is full. There are couples, kids, and a lot of Carhartt.
As our caller settles in behind the metal bingo cage and introduces himself as Sam, I scan the prize list for each round: Ruger 10/22 rifle, Weatherby Element 20-gauge shotgun, a wood-stocked Chiappa M1-22. I order a Busch Light tallboy and fiddle with my bright-pink dauber.
My personal fascination with gun bingo begins, as so many things in life do, with an episode of Bar Rescue. Specifically, it begins with the only Minnesota-filmed episode of Bar Rescue, a season four installment in which host Jon Taffer & Co. attempt to rectify a chaotic situation at Mac & Chesters SRO in Anoka. It’s a classic: motorcycle burnouts on picnic tables, feuds between owners Mac and Chester, drama on the bar-run softball fields. If you can believe it, these guys are not thrilled about taking advice from a chef named Vic Vegas. (Racket's past attempts to reflect on that ep were rebuffed by co-owner Elise Chester: "That was almost 10 years ago. It was a stupid makeover. The BR team was great but no, not interested.")
I Googled the bar as the episode ended to see if they’ve since closed and was surprised to see it’s apparently flourishing, with a new, Bar Rescue-taunting name: Back to the SRO Grill. (Taffer had changed it to “Boulder Lodge Bar and Grill.”) But I was more interested in their events page, where Back to the SRO listed something called “Second Amendment Bingo.”
“Bingo for guns?” I marveled, instantly clicking the link. “Is that… legal?”
Over the following months, thanks to either the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or the all-powerful algorithm, I saw gun bingo everywhere. Pistols and purses bingo at the Chaska VFW and shoot for a cure gun bingo at the Wabasha VFW. Gun bingo for dads and lads, gun bingo for college grads. Gun bingo to support baseball leagues, fire departments, and first responders.
Gun bingo isn’t just legal—it’s an increasingly formidable fundraising tool throughout Minnesota, especially in rural communities. And I’m not the only one who’s just recently become aware of it; as its popularity has grown, many nonprofits and community organizations have been hosting gun bingo for the first time, often with great success.
Heather Koffler, owner of River Valley Arms & Ammo in Morton, Minnesota, says she’s fielding so many requests to facilitate gun bingo events that she’s adding a section about fundraising to the gun shop’s redesigned website.
“I feel like it’s the new meat raffle, you know?” Koffler chuckles. “The meat raffle seems to be a Minnesota-ish thing, and this is the new version of that.”
Founded in 1937, Ducks Unlimited is the leader in conservation of North American wetlands, and event fundraising has long been a part of that mission. “DU really pioneered the model of events-based fundraising for conservation purposes,” says Chris Sebastian, the Tennessee-headquartered nonprofit’s communications director.
In the mid-1960s, Sebastian explains, that meant the kinds of things you might expect from a nonprofit—dinners and banquets and the like. But the list of happenings eventually grew to include ice fishing contests and other outdoor competitions. And then, there’s gun bingo.
“Gun bingo specifically was started there in Minnesota,” he says. “You guys are really the epicenter for this one particular style of event fundraising.”
Ducks Unlimited’s first bingo event was held in 2017. “And right away, it filled right up,” Sebastian says. “We kind of realized, ‘We have something special going on there.’”
The bingo events expanded across the state and eventually the country, and today they make up a good chunk of the 400+ events DU hosts each year. Ducks Unlimited is almost certainly the most prolific host of gun bingo throughout Minnesota; most weeks, there are at least two DU-affiliated “boomstick bingo” or “sportsman’s bingo” events listed on the organization’s website.
“We’ve learned that it gets that new audience in the door,” Sebastian says. “Our traditional banquets and dinners are very well known in the outdoors community, but folks who aren’t and love bingo are like, ‘Oh, what’s this?’”
(Hey, it worked on me—that event at Sal's was one of many throughout October hosted by Ducks Unlimited.)
If you, too, reacted to gun bingo’s existence with something like, “That’s legal?” well, it sure is. There are rules, of course. Winners must be of legal age to acquire a firearm (that’s 18 for long guns and 21 for handguns), and are required to pass a federal background check. Guns given away via bingo events must be sold to the organization by an ATF Federal Firearms License-holding distributor, and, depending on the event, you might not leave gun in hand—it’s up to the FFL if they want to run background checks day of or after everyone has gone home.
“We’re following every letter of the law; we’re still being safe about it,” says Koffler of River Valley Arms & Ammo, which, as an FFL, has facilitated gun bingo for local groups like the Morgan Fire Department, Wabasso Baseball Association, and American Legion Riders.
The fact that the FFL can handle just about everything on the gun side makes it surprisingly easy for curious nonprofits to get into gun bingo. This January, for example, the Mini Sota Agricultural Children's Museum will host its first-ever gun bingo event. Board member LeAnn Simonson, who’s heading up the event, says there have been “really no challenges.”
“We just had to find somebody who was willing to help us, supply the guns for us,” she says. In their case, that’s Riverdale Arms in Milan. And while tickets aren’t on sale yet, she’d imagine “about half” of them are spoken for already.
“It’s been very good,” she says. “Everyone’s excited.”
Simonson says that her nonprofit, which is working to build a farming-focused children’s museum in Benson, Minnesota, got the idea for gun bingo after hosting purse bingo for the first time last year. “We had people ask—the guys, in particular, ask—if we were ever going to do a type of gun bingo thing," she observes. Many groups have had success combining the two; in Frazee, Minnesota, the high school’s KAOTIC Robotics team just hosted its second-annual “Stags and Tags” purse and gun bingo night.
“We do it as a date night for people,” says KAOTIC lead mentor Eric Schaefer. “You can come and win a purse, or you can come and win a gun.”
Not every group is going to be quite as successful in its fundraising efforts as, say, Ducks Unlimited, which has more than 49,000 members in Minnesota.
“Bingo events are a big part of the annual Ducks Unlimited event fundraising in Minnesota, which in 2023 totaled $6 million for conservation efforts,” Sebastian says. “And that’s all really important funding that we need to do some really important work on the landscape.”
But even smaller nonprofits and community groups have found that gun bingo can help them raise several thousand dollars in a single night.
“One of our groups that does it pretty consistently… they typically are taking in about anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000,” says Koffler of River Valley Arms & Ammo. “That’s one night of fundraising, and that dollar amount pretty much exclusively comes from the bingo event.”
Koffler clarifies that it’s not just printing money. “We’ve also seen other ones that have just broke even,” she adds, “because they didn’t get the butts in the seats.”
But for those that do the work, advertising and promoting the event throughout the community, it has the potential to be a big money-maker. As Myranda VanDamme, president of the Glencoe Area Chamber of Commerce and co-chair of the Glencoe Days Committee, told the Star Tribune’s Richard Chin last year, gun and purse bingo “has saved our program.”
The organizers I spoke to for this story say there’s been virtually no controversy or complaints from community members about giving out guns in such a whimsical way.
“Actually, the community has embraced it,” Schaefer says. “The Frazee Community Club, they share our posts, and all the local businesses donate stuff for us to put into a raffle box.”
“We’re in rural Minnesota, and hunting is kind of everyone’s everyday life around here—it’s just second nature for pretty much all of us,” adds the agricultural museum’s Simonson. “It might be different in a different area, the metro might have different pushback than out here.”
“Around here, a lot of the gun bingos go to support things in the same or a parallel sort of industry, right?” Koffler says. “Pheasants Forever, Ducks Unlimited, local 4H clubs, high school track teams, things like that. So it really makes a lot of sense, because the folks that are into supporting those organizations are also more likely to be into firearms.”
Back at Sal’s Angus Grill, numbers are read, bingos are hollered, and Taurus .22 pistols and Winchester shotguns are spoken for. In between rounds, our bingo caller politely coerces folks to shell out a little more money for a raffle ticket to win a cooler, or to line up under the great antler chandelier for a chance at the Great Gun Giveaway.
Each request is met with smiles and open wallets; people are here to support the cause almost as much as they’re hoping to walk away with a new firearm.
Round after round passes—pyramid, postage stamp, small picture frame—and I never even get close to shouting, “Bingo!” I even put in an extra five bucks for a chance to win a duck decoy. No luck.
The final number of the blackout game is called, and I close out my tab. Just as well, I think, since I’m not really one of the hunting enthusiasts for whom the day really exists. Stolen valor, and all.
I had fun at gun bingo, and maybe I’ll even go again one of these days. But you’ll still be a lot more likely to find me at a meat raffle. I wouldn’t have much use for an SKB semi-automatic shotgun, but I know just what to do with several pounds of ground beef.
