A little Education session with my sweetheart & our friends...
Being working parents of small children, our friends got the idea to book us a couple of sitters & spend some adult time without the kids at the our private range and have lunch the Saturday before Valentine's Day.
For me, this not only meant helping my friend get more comfortable with her handgun, but also meant never missing an an opportunity to preach basic safety such as:
Treat Every Gun as Loaded
Keep the Muzzle Pointed in a Safe Direction
Keep your Finger OFF the Trigger Until on-Target AND Ready to Fire
Know your Target and What is Beyond
My wife and I brought about 6 different handguns to try out, while our friends brought two. The husband brought a really sweet Kimber 1911 that I must admit gives me a little twinge of envy, even though I wouldn't trade my Springfield Armory 1911 for the world. His wife brought a sweet little M&P .380 that she wanted to get much more comfortable using (you can see me going through all the functions of the M&P with her in the picture above).
In the picture below, you can see me working with my beautiful wife, going through one of our many handguns, and getting her comfortable with them as well.
The private Rifle and Pistol club I belong to has two locations: the Outdoor (main location) and an Indoor range. The outdoor location has Rifle, Pistol, Action Shooting, Skeet, 5-Stand and Archery courses. Our plan was to go to the outdoor range, reserve an Action Shooting Bay and shoot steel targets, but this was the week of crazy winter storms that shut down Texas & rained out our state, so we went to the Indoor range instead, to avoid the weather.
Qualified members (like myself) get 24-hour badged-access to the indoor range; which has 10 automated lanes. In other words, we didn’t suffer in making the decision to go indoors :-).
We pretty much had the range to ourselves for most of the day. At one point, two other members came in and shot on two other lanes briefly, and left again, leaving us to our great day of safe, fun shooting.
The way it works is... I am the full member and therefore I become the acting Range Safety Officer (RSO) for my guests; where I am responsible for ensuring they are all safe shooters. One shooter at a time. No handling of firearms behind the line.
We had plenty of misfire practice this day, since some of the ammo we got during this COVID-19 ammo shortage is not working out real well. There's definitely something odd with the primers they used in a batch that we all bought, for sure. Some rounds would just randomly not fire when the primers were struck causing us to have to manually eject the live round and try the next one in the magazine. Sometimes 3 or 4 in a row. When we loaded those same rounds again, they would sometimes work. Sometimes not.
After it was all said and done... We went back to our respective homes, put our firearms back into their safes, paid the baby sitters... Then met up for a cook out with the kids and finally broke out the adult beverages, and polished off one of my favorite bottles of scotch.
It was the absolute definition of a great day!
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