Gone shootin’. Practically.
I like to shoot. I’ve been lucky enough so far never to have needed to shoot an animal for food or a fellow human being out of self defense. Although I consider myself a moderate on most issues, the right to keep and bear arms is a freedom that I cherish. That’s probably due in part to the fact that I grew up in a fairly rural area, and from a fairly young age tagged along with my father to the gun range for target practice. I was probably ten years old when I first personally shot anything, and I seem to recall having reliably hit a target at that age. After a few years of no shooting at all, I pretty easily earned my Rifle Shooting Merit Badge at Boy Scout camp. That was more years ago than I like to admit, and unless you count paintball I haven’t discharged a firearm since.
That is, until last weekend, when I visited family for a wedding. (Insert hillbilly joke here.) My uncle, who is a part-time competitive marksman (and father of the bride), took dad and me to the pistol range for a few hours of turning neatly cast bits of lead and brass into irregularly flat ones.
My guest pass to Bluegrass Sportsmens League
This trip was my first time doing practical shooting, in which time counts as much as accuracy. It turns out that from the holster at thirty yards I can reliably hit four rectangular steel plates, each about the size of an average Dell notebook computer, and then a larger fifth plate, in just over six seconds. That’s about a second slower than my dad and about three seconds slower than my uncle, but not a bad time for someone who hasn’t handled a loaded weapon in about 536 million seconds. More amazing is that I can do this with no damage to that flap of skin between the thumb and forefinger of the dominant hand, a part of the less experienced shooter that Glock actions seem to take particular delight in biting.
I’m now going to have to join my wife in applying for a Georgia firearms license (Georgia, my home these days, is one of the few United States that requires a license to carry openly) and see if I can get that time under six seconds before my next visit to BGSL.
