Father-Daughter Bonding
Lanie and I decided to brave the cold weather (24°F) and visit the range.
Okay the range is indoors but with the huge air changes necessary to clear all the smoke it’s not warm in there. There are some overhead heaters that make the top of your head warm, but that’s about it. As a precaution against the cold, I actually wore socks and shoes.
I’ve been planning a Friday afternoon trip to the range to test Katie’s .380 Sig before she gets back from vacation. I wanted to see if, as I suspected, it has a problem with the slide lock (that’s my excuse for going to the range with yet another gun and I’m sticking with it. You can believe it or not).
The day didn’t start well, my morning didn’t pan out as planned with an unexpected trip out to try and sort out a mid-meeting computer problem at St. John’s. The trip was a success, at least in as far as getting the errant video camera working again, but it cut straight through my to-do list. I arrived back home lunchtime with nothing (planned) done, and thinking I might abandon the idea of going shooting. Approaching the house I noticed Lanie was home, and I wondered if she might be interested in going to the range if I decided to go. I cleared a couple of things, called in at work, signed off for the day, and asked Lanie if she fancied going. She was all dressed, wrapped up ready for the cold before I’d finished putting the guns in a carry case.
Lanie’s grandparents have a farm, so she’s familiar with rifles and shotguns, but, she’s just never fired a handgun. We’ve tried to ensure that the kids have a broad range of basic skills, and the safe handling and use of firearms is one of those skills I firmly believe they should all have. So in the course of the afternoon, we went through all the safety drills, and Lanie was particularly interested in why I have a gun, given that they aren’t available in the UK (they were a lot more available when I was a kid as I noted here). At the range I tried out Katie’s gun first — bullseye first (or second) shot, you’ve got to like a gun that enables you to do that. I then put a single round in it for Lanie. She hit the target and thought it was great. I slowly built up the number of rounds, and then let her load and fire as she wanted. She was getting very good groups and bullseyes, probably out-shooting me. As it turned out, I was right about the slide, it did fail to lock back on at least one occasion, but not all the time, so it’s probably not worth replacing the slide-lock spring right now.
When I fired off a full magazine from the Beretta Lanie was duly impressed by the noise and percussion, but didn’t want to try it. The size, weight, and potential kick put her off. We stayed for about an hour, and as we were getting near to leaving I persuaded her to try a couple of rounds in the Beretta as it is the gun she is most likely to use in the future. It really doesn’t seem to kick much more than the Sig. Lanie went from not wanting to fire it to, “can I try again?” in the time it took to take those two shots.
I guess going to range in future is potentially going to be more expensive, but I’m okay with that. Oh, and I’ve got to clean Katie’s gun tomorrow before she gets home, and I’m alright with that too.
This is a mixture of shots from both guns. I did much better than last time, and the picture above is to prove it. Still low and left, but that’s so that there’s room on the target for the gun when I take a picture 🙂 . No excuse for the few stragglers though.
Copyright © 2018 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.