You can buy a 1911 for $300 these days, not sure I have seen a $1000 1911 in anyone's holster at a WB match. My wild bunch gun definitely wasn't $1000, not now nor 22 years ago when I bought it.
Pump shotguns are under $500. There are M12s on Gunbroker for $3-400 all the time.
Rifle there's a lot of cheaper options, but yeah, a 73 costs more than a thousand bucks.
Gen Z put Creed back on the charts 30 years later. Dozens of them were shooting at the match I was at last weekend, which has a similar cost of entry. They're showing up and doing very well. A friend of mine won the USPSA Production Nationals in 2016, I believe he was 18 years old at the time. He isn't quite Gen Z, but he was shooting at 12.
Interesting how the goal post moved after I pointed out that your response is not credible. Nobody has marketed it to them, and it's not "cool," so they're not doing it. They aren't having kids, either, the birthrate among them is a fraction of what it was for our generations. I don't know how Creed is getting people who weren't even born when the records came out to come to their concerts, but their concerts are full of people who weren't born when I first heard the songs, which I didn't think were particularly remarkable even then.
The youth are the future of everything. If we don't market to them, we're done. Make it "cool" and they'll show up.
I shot my first match a few weeks after my 21st birthday when I became old enough to buy a handgun. There's no reason we can't reel them in. I shot more when I was in my 20s than I do now, and I actively try to find the time now compared to then when I just showed up.
If PRS, USPSA, NRL22, IPSC, IDPA, ATA, NSSA, and so on can do it, we can, too.