Captain's Corner

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words:

For those of you who don’t know… I enjoy firearms. I enjoy heading out to the range with a toolbox full of ammo and a variety of different rifles and pistols. I enjoy the challenge of putting holes in paper, bottles, metal at various ranges. I enjoy the noise, I enjoy the kick of the fire arm (that’s right… I enjoy the bruise my Enfield .303 gives me!)… there’s just nothing quite like it.

Unfortunately Ann has been a little leery of firearms and has never understood why I enjoy it. In fact, buying ammo has previously been hard to justify. I’m sure I’m partially to blame… after all I took Ann shooting for her first time while we were dating (HEY, we’d been dating a year or so… it wasn’t our first date or anything…) and I made a few mistakes… I took a pistol that had an aluminum frame (ie: more kick) to a local indoor (read: LOUDER) shooting range, and didn’t ensure we had some space between us and the other shooters (in other words, lots of noise all around us)… so Ann shoots, screams, drops the gun on the counter and leaves… waiting in the car until I had packed up my stuff.

Six or seven long years later we go on vacation to Kerrville, TX where they have an official Olympic Training Site and Ann tells me to bring a gun along, because she’ll suffer through an hour or so of watching me shoot. So I take a long my Hungarian SA-85 AK (yes, that’s a variation of an AK-47 you see in the pictures above… Yes, it’s semi-automatic…). We’re outside this time, the AK doesn’t really make much noise, nor does it kick much. I set Ann up with the foam kind of ear plugs and I give her my over the ear muffs so she’s got double protection from the noise and I get to work. After a while of punching holes in paper at 100 yards I start to move my stuff over to the 25 yard range a few feet away. Ann asks why I’m moving and I tell her it’s she can hit the target easier since she’s never shot a rifle. At this point she laughs.

After a few minutes I talk her into taking one shot. I start by explaining the rules of firearms… Go ahead and ask her… she’ll probably remember. Then I show her how to load the rifle, chamber a round and put it back on safety. Then I hand her the rifle and explain to her how to hold it, how to sight it in, etc. She does as I instructed and fires one round, stops and asks if she hit the target. She did, so she tells me she’ll try one more. She fires and again, asks if she hit the target (she did), and says again she’ll shoot one more. A few minutes go by and there’s a distinct click (instead of the normal boom). Ann looks around kinda spooked and asks me what she did to the gun. I laugh and tell her she’s shot all 30 rounds… the magazine is empty. She looks at me kinda funny and asks if I want to shoot… so I load her up and do some shooting standing and about as fast as I can and still stay on target. About 45 seconds to a minute later, I’m reloading the gun and Ann says, “Hey, this is fun… mind if I shoot again?”

I of course let her. She shoots another magazine, the last that I brought on the trip and we start to pack it up. Turns out I needed to get her into the right environment for her to enjoy it… So now she keeps bugging me about when we’re going shooting next.

Anyway, we did a lot on vacation, mostly a lot of relaxing (read: nothing), but one of my favorite parts was getting Ann to enjoy something I enjoy…

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