I’ll be honest: I don’t particularly like wearing shooting glasses. I wear them because I’ve been hit in the face by ricochet or fragments at least three times while shooting. One left me with a bloody lip, and another struck my shooting glasses instead of my eye. I distinctly remember thinking, I’m really glad I’m wearing these right now. I tend to mix up which eye pro I bring to the range, so I won’t pretend this is the only pair I use, but these Walker’s are an inexpensive, impact-rated option that should work well for most shooters. Eye protection isn’t exciting, and I don’t especially enjoy wearing it, but I’m always thankful I have it when it matters.

These are probably my favorite basic earplugs for the range. They’re corded, reusable, comfortable, and rated at 26 dB NRR, and the tri-flange design gives me a much more consistent fit than the cheap disposable foam plugs. A three-pack usually runs me somewhere around $10–15, although the price moves around, and I’d still happily buy them if they were $20. I probably reuse mine longer than I’m supposed to, but they’ve become one of those pieces of gear that I always want in my range bag. I use them by themselves outdoors fairly often, and when I want more protection, I can easily wear electronic ear pro over them.

These are the electronic muffs I use most often. They’re usually around $45–50, they’re slim enough that they don’t feel excessively bulky while shooting, and the electronic amplification lets me hear conversations and range commands without giving up hearing protection. I also like having the option to wear them over my Peltor plugs when I want to double up. My only recurring problem has nothing to do with Walker’s: I almost always forget to turn them off when I’m done shooting. Because of that, I strongly recommend keeping a few spare AAA batteries in your range bag. It’s quite irritating to discover your electronic ear pro is dead five minutes into a range day.

These 30″ × 18″ cardboard targets have become a regular part of my range setup. At around $26 for 20, they work out to roughly $1.30 each, and the package includes 1,000 target pasters. That sounds like a lot, but it works out to about 50 pasters per target, and I routinely put considerably more than 50 rounds on a piece of cardboard before replacing it. The cardboard holds up well, the pasters let me keep track of fresh hits between strings, and I can get a lot of training out of a single box. As you’ll see with the next item, though, I definitely go through more pasters than they give me.

The 1,000 pasters included with the cardboard targets above don’t last me nearly as long as the targets themselves, so I buy these separately. For around $10, you get 4,000 0.87″ brown pasters across four rolls. That’s about four pasters for a penny, which means I don’t have to think twice about pasting targets between strings. They’re cheap, easy to keep in my range gear, and the brown kraft paper works well on cardboard. I use a lot of them, so buying 4,000 at a time just makes sense.

These might be my favorite cheap range hack. They’re technically 4×6 thermal shipping labels, but I use them as disposable shooting targets. I stick one directly in the center of the A-zone on my 30×18 cardboard targets and shoot it until I decide it’s time for a clean one. Then I simply stick a fresh label directly over the old one and keep shooting. If a shot lands outside the label, that’s where the brown target pasters from above come in.

For around $8–9 you get 500 labels, so each fresh 4×6 target costs less than two cents. Layering them also helps reinforce the center of the cardboard over time, so I can get a surprising amount of shooting out of a single target. They’re shipping labels. I use them as targets. I love them.