Finally got me to the shootin' range

Over the long 4th of July weekend, I got a call from my buddy Nyk. It was time to go shooting. We had blathered on about it long enough. There is an indoor shooting range, Gilbert Small Arms Range, down in Springfield where you can buy monthly membership passes for only $8.

We drove down, signed up, got our gear, and got ready to shoot.

The first step was to learn to load it. The gun I'm loading in this shot is a .38 special Ruger SP101, a revolver. Incredibly easy to load, just drop the bullets in and pop it closed.

Nyk brought his own gun, a Walther PPK/S .380 semi-auto. For this one you have to load a magazine, which was kind of time consuming, but if you loaded a bunch of the magazines beforehand, this gun would be much faster to reload than the revolver.

OK, I will be the first to admit it. I was a little jittery about shooting a handgun. I never had before in my whole life, it was my first time at a real shooting range, my adrenaline was going, it was loud, I didn't know what it would feel like... but, after Nyk shot a couple of test rounds, it was my turn!

It IS loud, and the gun DOES have a kick, but with the ear protection, it's not too hard on the ears, and if you hold your elbows steady, like Nyk told me to, the kick is quite manageable. I was practicing shooting off two rounds in quick succession, trying to keep the kick to a minimum so I could keep the second shot within the target.

I also tried shooting Nyk's gun a few times, but his ejects the cartridges as you shoot, and the flying metal kind of scared/distracted me. It also had a harder kick so I didn't feel like I was controlling it as well, and I'm sorry, I was shooting live rounds from a real gun. I wanted to feel totally in control. Back to the Ruger.

We spent, oh, probably about 45 minutes there, maybe an hour. Not long, really, but enough to get a good feel and have some fun. It's empowering to learn how to use something like that. I'm not some gun freak, you all know me, but who does it hurt to learn how to use a weapon safely and properly, if it's something you're interested in?

A good day at the range - Ginger masters a revolver.

Nyk remembered to grab one of the first rounds I shot to keep as a souvenir, and we kept the targets, too. I actually hung one of them on my bedroom door just in time for the ant exterminators to come last week. They needed to know that messing with any of the items in my apartment while I was not there was not an action to be taken lightly. I thought a bullet-hole ridden silhouette target would probably do the trick better than anything.