I have been lucky, lately. The LGS range near me has had its share of new people, but has not seemed to attract jerks. New shooters have been happy to accept pointers on technique and safety, and the rare safety mistakes I have seen have not been repeated, once identified and corrected.
Jerk behavior seems less common in the midwest, though I did not find it all that problematic in the southeast (FL, GA) either. Ran into a couple macho males who were input-resistant, particularly if with females, but rarely encountered truly bad attitudes.
Ignorance, yes. Defensiveness, yes.
The only case I can recall where attitude concerned me was at a state maintained (but unsupervised) range in the Ocala National Forest in north central Florida. Bunch of idiot (for lack of a better term) testosterone-brained twenty-somethings showed up with their black rifles and put on a great display of how not to shoot rapid fire. I packed up and left, as asking this group to shoot their own targets, keep rate of fire down enough so they could hit paper, etc was more likely to start a fight than have the desired effect.
Please note that I have nothing against black rifles. A friend and I were shooting my AR fairly quickly in my range (the joys of having an acreage in the sticks!!) yesterday.
Side note: Decided to shoot my last two boxes of Wolf, which I had bought before I knew any better. About 30 rounds into it, the whole "steel cases don't expand enough, so gases and residue get into the chamber and gum things up," reared its ugly head.
My rifle runs clean on Federal and other brass cased cartridges, but I will not feed it any more steel.
Back to topic: I recommend sticking to ranges that have some supervision. I don't mean an RO/SO necessarily (and in fact I have found some of those to be range nazis), but some higher authority who can be called upon if shooters do not respond favorably to polite requests.
Better yet, I highly recommend buying in the country, if you can.
