I finally went to that range and fired a gun for the first time! My friend and I went together!
Upon entering, I looked around the storefront for a bit and recognized quite a few guns for sale before we got started.
There was a much smaller selection to choose from for rentals though. Nothing automatic.
I opted to just use my friends .40 M+P since I had familiarized myself with it for weeks now.
I got pretty anxious when we moved to the live range and I could hear gunshots from beyond the door. The ear protection we had definitely helped though.
As we entered the live range, It was not crowded at all, and the people next to me were total noobs too.
Compared to the elderly large guy, and the new girls still panicking over shooting guns, I was the leader of THAT fire team.
I needed no assistance. Little did the instructors know, I've been mentally preparing for this for weeks!
I pre-loaded 3
magazines, loaded the 1st, and trained my aim on the target for like 25 seconds.
My 1st shot hit the middle of the target perfectly at 7ft away. I was expecting the recoil to have a whiplash feel from the barrel, but it happened so fast, it was over immediately.
I moved the target to 20ft and fired 19 rounds with decent accuracy.
I found that every shot, I kept wincing and blinking hard in anticipation.
I also thought I'd be firing rounds at a wall all "willy-nilly",
but It felt like every bullet fired mattered. Every shot count.
Shooting a firearm and hitting your target quickly is not as easy as I thought.
After I got comfortable with shooting those 20 rounds, my friend proposed a shell game, He loaded one magazine out of 3, and I had to load and fire all 3.
I wouldn't know which was loaded and which was empty. It was kinda obvious which mag was loaded due to weight, but the uncertainty made me grit my teeth more when pulling the trigger.
For my last 10 rounds, I tried firing 2 rounds back-to-back, but my accuracy dropped horribly. I've found it difficult to hit my target without standing in one place and training on it with one eye. Im pretty sure in combat, standing in one place and aiming makes YOU an easy target.
I was going to take pictures of my paper targets but my friend threw them in the trash immediately.
That was actually a pretty fun experience. I wouldn't mind going again and trying a rifle now!
Am I a big boy now?
This post was edited by its author on .
