soapbox

On those one or two occassions when I’m home each year, my dad and I like to get in a little target shooting. Dad was an active hunter as a young man, so his collection of guns is well-rounded and most of the pieces have seen enough use (and been cared for well enough over the years) to feel really nice when shot. Dad no longer hunts (although dispensing with poisonous snakes and other worrisome pests close to the house does keep him in practice), and I’ve only been hunting rarely, but we still really enjoy a good afternoon’s worth of target shooting. I could be easily convinced to sign up for some trap-and-skeet classes and/or get into some target shooting if any of y’all are interested.

Details after the jump…

Last weekend, we had some fun burning through some partial boxes of old .22 short ammo, using my dad’s little Browning carbine that only shoots shorts. (Most .22-caliber guns favor the .22 long rifle round, even if the gun in question is a pistol.) He’s had that gun almost 40 years, and it’s a very well-made gun to begin with, so it shoots extremely well. Plus, since you’re only plinking off shorts (resulting in relatively quiet reports and very little recoil, most of which is easily compensated using the weight of the gun) and since it’s a semi-auto with about a 15-round magazine, it’s a heck of a lot of fun to shoot. Even though I only get to practice once or twice a year, it turns out I’m still a decent shot: at 100 feet or so, and firing off the full magazine in about 20 seconds or less, my groups were still less than a full span of my hand.

We finished off that day by firing off three old 12-gauge shotgun shells. Birdshot hitting a full two-liter bottle of water at 20 yards is always fun.

This afternoon, we killed a little time by milling through some old rounds of larger-caliber stuff. Unlike the quiet .22 shorts, the volume of the reports today had us wearing our shooter’s earmuffs for hearing protection. While the noise level isn’t too loud with the .30-30 lever-action rifle (the same sort as the Old-West-style gun usually shot from the hip in old John Wayne films) or the 9mm Beretta (model 92 D Compact L) semi-auto handgun, the hefty bang from the .357 magnum revolver can leave unprotected ears ringing for several minutes afterwards.

With only a handful of old rounds for each to dispose of, we didn’t get much practice in, but I could still group my six .30-30 shots within one handspan at about 100 feet. As is true for most shooters, I’m a better shot with the .357 when using it single-action, rather than double-action; I couldn’t even keep my shots confined to a 16″ x 16″ target firing double-action at about 50 feet, but, shooting single-action, I maintained a loose group within a 12″ diameter. The 9mm Beretta, despite being only a 4-inch barrel (the .357 has a 6-incher), is such a superbly designed weapon that even shooting through its full 13-round magazine at a fairly rapid pace can yield tight (within an 8-inch diameter) group of shots in even my relatively novice hands. Since the Beretta uses up much of the recoil energy in throwing back the slide to eject the spent cartridge and cycle the next round, it’s very easy to re-target the weapon between rounds. One can easily see how such a gun can be very lethal in the hands of a police officer well-trained in marksmanship.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 30th, 2005   at 10:06 pm   and is filed under from the road, sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.