New shooter ...

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... after-action report.

So, my nephew was visiting my dad and his wife the last two weeks, and I went up a day early to collect my daughter and took the extra day to take Garrett shooting. Garrett lives outsiede of Chicago and as such has limited opportunity to shoot real firearms. He told me that he'd shot every other kind of gun ... BB gun, pellet gun, airsoft gun even a nail gun ... but no real guns.

So I packed up some firearms and we went to a public range to do some familiarization fire (fam fire to those in the military!).

The subjects were a Savage MkII bolt action and Ruger GP100 w/ 6" barrel I borrowed from my son (the GP100 was his 21st birthday present) and I brought a Ruger 22/45, my carry gun - a Ruger SR1911 and my FN-FAL (Entriprise built on an Imbel receiver).

Now Garrett has obviously played quite a few shooter video games and was able to identify the FAL and SR1911 by sight. After I showed him all of the firearms and explained the differences, we loaded up the 22/45 and started shooting!

Despite none of the weapons being sighted-in adequately he did surprisingly well, accuracy-wise. We had a  pack of shoot n' see targets, as well as a few I printed out, as well as a couple of over-ripe cantelopes which provided much enjoyment.

All together he put about 150 rds downrange and apparently enjoyed himself. I hope his experience encourages him to keep up with it and prod his dad into taking him out sometime, maybe to an Appleseed. We'll see!

As this was my first new shooter experience, I remembered to explain the 4 Rules, but forgot all about having explodey-type targets so that we're not going back and forth to the targets to check. The shoot n' see targets helped but the cantelopes were the most fun. We stayed at the 25 yd line the whole 3 hours so it wasn't too bad, but it was something that was driven home. I'll ask for forgiveness since I was 200 miles away from home, but I'll endeavor to get some centerfire steels so that we can hear and see the results of the shots and maybe get to shooting some out to 100 yds or so. But that will have to wait until next year!

pm