Sports

It was a pretty normal day at the range today, albeit a little bit warm inside. We took our usual suite of firearms – the .45s, 9mm, .357s and shotguns. We also did our usual thing by making videos and taking photos to view later and maybe post on the blog. All this was completely normal as Damsel took the video of me shooting the Glock 30 – until the eighth round, that is – the brass flew out of the breech and landed – well – in a delicate place as far as Damsel was concerned.

The red marks from the hot brass casing were visible hours later. Oh yes – I have her permission to include the ‘delicate place’ photo at the end of the video on the right.

Rated PG – this sort of brings a new definition to the ‘tap, rack, bang’ phrase . . .

“As long as it’s still movin’ I’m still shootin’!” That’s Damsel’s description of her target practice technique when shooting at silhouette targets with her shotgun. To that I say “As long as she likes doing that, I’ll keep the targets coming.”

Yesterday, I put up a picture of the dirty guns all broken down for cleaning. One of the regulars on this blog dropped us a line in the comments about how much fun we must have had and also observed that our patio gun cleaning might unnerve our neighbors – well, we did have fun, but since the patio area isn’t visible to neighbors of normal height, we can’t comment on any jumpy nerves. Nobody in the area seems to react to the snick-snick noises our shotguns make when we’re cycling the fore-end to distribute the dry lube.

Our reader friend, Glenn B, blogs at “Ballseye’s Boomers,” a really neat blog. After reading his comments, I realized that I went to put him on the blogroll a while back but for whatever reason (senior moment?) it didn’t get done. That has been corrected now. Go to Glenn’s site and read about how he got the name for the blog – you will enjoy learning about that.

So, that brings us to the video here which has little to do with anything other than to relate to the post yesterday. I took some video of Damsel shooting her 20 gauge Remington 870 followed by a video of the broken down guns in the tranquility of our patio (listen to the songbirds and babbling water feature) followed by a before and after cleaning shot of the muzzle on Damsel’s Warthog.

All these dirty firearms parts look daunting, but seldom take more than a few minutes per firearm to get them into ready-for-service condition. We like to sit on the patio where we can listen to music and the tranquil babbling of a water feature while we calmly bring order to this chaotic array of filthy gun parts.

Actually, we’re not cheap and can afford to put up a new target for each shooter when we go to the range. But sometimes we put up a target and see how long it will last.

Initially, we put up a small pistol target and took turns shooting the hand guns at it at it until it got pretty beat up. Then, I put a stick-on target on the beat up one and went at it again. In short order, however, the stick on was all shot up.

At this point, since we still had ammo for the hand guns, I put up a silhouette target and we took turns shooting at it until we were out of ammo.

Now, enter the shotguns. I brought my Remington 870 12 gauge and took five shots at it. The target was battered, but still hanging. At this point, Damsel took her 20 gauge Remington 870 and gave it the coup de grace as you can see when you play the video. We both got a laugh out of it.

Today was a lot of fun at the range. You should go shooting.

One of the drills we like to practice when we go to the range is to fire at silhouette targets while trying to avoid letting any rounds fall outside of the body mass. We do pretty well when firing at the center of mass of a target. This assumes that you have a shot at the center of mass.

What if the target is partly shielded by an object, like a fence or an automobile? It’s a little more difficult if all you can see is the head and shoulders. So, I like to practice shooting at the nose of the target and try to keep the rounds close while firing about one round per second. I’m getting better at it, but I always seem to have a couple of outliers. One of these pierced an ear and could probably be considered a “to whom it may concern” round.