EXETER — Sherrie Whitford wanted to mark her 40th birthday with a special celebration, so she gathered four of her girlfriends and did something none had ever tried.

They went to the new indoor gun range in town and fired off boxes of rounds.

“It was amazing,” Whitford says of her time at the Pine Ridge Indoor Shooting Range. “There were those first few minutes when you are nervous. But we all had to take a safety course first, which made us feel comfortable. Then we shot .22 [caliber] rifles, tried revolvers, some semiautomatics, stuff like that.... It was a great experience.”

At a time when America’s debate over guns remains as divisive as ever and mass shootings have become almost cliched catastrophes, investors are seeing markets in what they say is the growing popularity of shooting.

Rhode Island’s newest shooting range, The Elite Indoor Gun Range, opens this weekend in South Kingstown.

Pine Ridge opened last year. The Midstate Gun Co., in Coventry, opened the state’s first public indoor shooting range in 2013 and so far has had some 21,000 people go through its gun-safety course, says owner Kyle McCarthy.

In January, The Preserve at Boulder Hill, a highbrow enclave in Richmond offering the well-heeled such refinements as bird hunting and fine bourbon, plans to open what it says will be the longest “indoor underground” shooting range in the country. Each of its four concrete rifle tunnels stretches 150 yards.

Mark Fay, co-owner of the Elite Indoor Gun Range and a Providence lawyer, says southern New England has been slow “to the movement.” Other, less liberal, regions of the country have seen a growth in shooting ranges for the last several years, he says.

He’s convinced there’s a profit to be made from all those Rhode Islanders, including “professional people” who’ve always enjoyed the sport of shooting. “They just don’t talk about it” in mixed company.

According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade organization for gun manufacturers, the number of shooters in America increased by 14 percent between 2006 and 2015. In that final year alone, male participation grew 4 percent while female participation skyrocketed 58 percent.

President Obama was sometimes described as the best gun salesman in America. Because of his call for stricter gun control, gun manufacturers reported triple-digit increases in gun sales in the eight years he was in office.

Gun range operators say they are now seeing many of those new gun owners who want to learn how to shoot. Many shooters have turned to indoor gun ranges because in Rhode Island and elsewhere, fewer outdoor spaces exist for target shooting. And indoor ranges are much quieter, so they don’t disturb suburbia.

“You can definitely trace the popularity and growth of [gun] clubs to firearm sales,” says David Jones, president of the Newport Rifle Club, in Middletown, one of the oldest gun clubs in the country.

Jones, who retired from a career in the Navy, is also a firearms instructor at Pine Ridge and Midstate, both of which offer regular “Ladies’ Night” events.

“A lot of people have been conditioned to think, ‘Oh, firearms — bad — and the people who do it are bad,’” says Jones. “But go check the shooting lanes. It’s plumbers and doctors and lawyers. We have some professors from URI. It’s just a microcosm of society.”

The increased popularity of shooting sports “has been a trend for the last several years,” says Michael Bazinet, spokesman for the shooting sports foundation. The trend, however, isn’t often recognized “unless you are part of it.”

Women and social media are helping to spread the word. “Women are the fastest-growing category of gun owners,” says Bazinet. “They figure if they’re going to learn to shoot, let’s make it a social thing” — and they are posting their experiences online.

The state Department of Environmental Management lists on its website 33 gun ranges in Rhode Island. Most are local rod and gun clubs that have operated for decades. But the list also includes those newer indoor ranges that have opened.

It’s another special event at Pine Ridge, and on this weekday afternoon a steady stream of members and guests pull into the lot beside what resembles a large warehouse for the chance to shoot the newest firearms from Sig Sauer, the New Hampshire gun manufacturer.

A Sig Sauer sales rep is offering more than two dozen firearms to try, from historic replica 9mm handguns to military-style tactical rifles like the MCX Virtus and M400 Elite in titanium gray.

Joseph Sawyer, 50, of Narragansett, a longtime sports-shooting enthusiast, has come with his daughter Ashley, 22, who majored in forensic biology at Roger Williams University and is a certified phlebotomy technician.

Shooting, says Sawyer, “has a dual purpose” for him. “First it’s fun, but it’s also good to know how to shoot a gun, as we know, in this day and age.”

Sawyer is reluctant to say where he works; he and some co-workers have engaged occasionally in “heated” gun debates. The entrenched arguments never go anywhere, so these days he’d rather just agree to disagree and keep a low profile when it comes to his hobby.

“I don’t need to explain myself, just like they don’t need to explain themselves,” he says.

Ashley, who took up shooting with her father in 2013 when she was considering applying to the FBI, has had to defend her shooting interest with many of her college peers.

“Most of them are very shocked when they learn that I shoot,” she says. “They ask, ‘How are you okay with guns?’ I tell them that it’s a sport and I don’t plan to use it on other people.”

Cars can be just as dangerous as guns, she often argues. “It’s the people holding them that are the problem, not the gun.”

Pine Ridge’s owner, Mike Aiello, grew up in South County in “a different era,” when it was acceptable, he says, for a kid to take a .22 rifle to the local gravel pit to shoot.

When he thought about taking his own two boys target shooting, he went to the local gun store in Wakefield for ammunition and learned “all those places I used to shoot in as a kid were now neighborhoods.”

He ended up driving to an indoor range in North Attleboro, the American Firearms School. “The parking lot was mobbed, and half the license plates there were Rhode Island.”

Aiello, who owns the Bon Vue Inn tavern in Narragansett, “saw a market potential.”

After more than two years of planning, construction and licensing meetings with Exeter town officials, the Pine Ridge Indoor Shooting Range opened in April 2016. Annual membership fees run between $400 and $650. Non-members can rent one of the 15 lanes for $25 an hour.

All shooters must first pass a criminal background check and go through a 45-minute gun safety course if they don’t have proof of previous gun training — common requirements at ranges. All shooting is supervised by a certified firearms expert.

“I had a neighbor who I didn’t know loved guns until I opened up,” says Aiello. “He’s now a member.” Many shooting enthusiasts fly under the radar of others, he says. “They just don’t want people to know. It’s not an acceptable thing. You kind of get labeled a wacko if you like guns.”

Aiello has bigger plans for the Pine Ridge range than just shooting. He’s installing two golf simulators, baseball hitting and pitching cages, and upstairs, an elevated archery range that will appeal to bow hunters, who often hunt from trees.

“Shooting is a lot like golf, where the more you do it, you start getting better and it becomes addictive,” says Aiello. “You want to keep improving.”

Aiello says he gets a group of guys who come in every Sunday after church to shoot.

He says he has an 80-year-old woman who is a member, who started shooting her husband’s .45 caliber pistol — a heavy handgun that he told her was too powerful for her. But she liked it so much she bought her own.

The next Ladies’ Night at Pine Ridge is scheduled for Jan. 23. According to the range’s Facebook page, six of the 10 slots are filled, with 269 others expressing interest.

For $100, each woman will take a gun-safety course and get to shoot eight different handguns and two rifles.

Aiello is also planning a Valentine’s Day event he’s calling “Guns and Roses.”

Each female shooter will receive a complimentary rose with her training and shooting. He expects the men will be waiting in line to shoot the club’s .357 Magnums because “every guy wants to be Dirty Harry for the night.”

At least one new Rhode Island gun range is drawing controversy.

A proposed outdoor range in Coventry has attracted wide opposition from neighbors who say they are worried about noise and property devaluation and raised a safety issue, noting the range would be about a mile from a school.

So many people showed up Wednesday for a Zoning Board meeting at the Town Hall auditorium, the crowd exceeded legal capacity. The meeting was postponed until next month when it will be held in a bigger venue.

As polarizing as guns are, the bulls-eye of truth is neither black nor white as far as Sherrie Whitford is concerned. It’s gray.

“I firmly believe in everybody’s right” to own a gun, she says. Yet “I’m for gun control. I do believe it should be controlled better.”

Whitford says she’d recommend other women try shooting if for no other reason than to learn firsthand about an issue everyone has an opinion about.

“I wasn’t sure how I would feel about it,” she says. “But I enjoyed it and it did give me a sense of empowerment, that I wouldn’t be scared to use [a gun] if I ever had to.”