Today my dad and I went to our homemade rifle range on the property of an old family friend.  I took along a truckload of guns & ammo just so I'd have anything dear old dad might want to shoot, but we ended up spending so much time on one gun that we kind of ran out of time.  It was getting hot, and we knew there was a good mid-day meal waiting for us (here in the south we call such a meal "dinner," not "lunch").

We discussed some improvements that should be made to the range.  The new benches are much better since my dad and our friend rebuilt them, but we are probably going to erect a small canopy over the bench for some shade.  I also want to work up some kind of shell-catcher, I'm just not sure how to do it.  Also, we forgot to take chairs, so we were having to kneel behind the bench.  When they rebuilt the benches, they even made one for right-handed and one for left-handed use.  I'm probably the only left-hander who will ever shoot there.

We were having problems sighting in a 10/22 that my dad had recently put a scope on.  It seemed the scope didn't actually adjust the crosshairs like it should have when the adjustment screw things were turned (what's the technical term for those, anyway?).  He was shooting what I would consider great groups with it, though, about 1.5 inches at 50 yards.  It's supposed to become his anti-squirrel sniper rifle.  It took about 100 rounds to get it just right.

He also came up with an RG from somewhere!  In .22 Magnum, a nine-shot revolver that was built to look like a Peacemaker but was double-action.  The double-action pull must have been at least 23 pounds or something so we had to shoot it single-action.  I'm not kidding, the trigger pull was unbelievably heavy.  The rear sight was so rudimentary it was almost non-existent.  I have never seen a revolver that was so unreliable.  The cylinder constantly jammed and there seemed to be a sort of sweet spot where you had to cock the hammer just right or the thing wouldn't fire.  The target looked more like a shotgun spread target than a pistol target when we finally gave up on it.  So in a few shorts days I went from never having heard of these guns before, to reading about them at Xavier's blog (previous link), to actually trying to shoot one.

He also shot his old Ruger Single Six.  It's an old model, with fixed sights and an 8-inch barrel.  This one is a whole world away from the RG.  It shot great.  My dad said it still didn't shoot good enough for squirrels, and I didn't have the heart to tell him it's only a matter of practice.  My dad can probably still outshoot me when it comes to rifles, but he has shot handguns so little that I'm way ahead of him on that.  Anyway, that long-barreled Single Six of his is a fantastic gun.

I did just a little pistol shooting, nothing much to speak of, and then broke out the .50 caliber Hawken muzzle loader.  He had never seen it in operation before, so I gave him the whole tour of what to do with it and how to load it.  It has double-set triggers, and long ago I adjusted them to give me a hair trigger when set.  I had forgotten how light the trigger was, and the first shot went off too early.  It still hit the target, but was outside the outer ring.  Fortunately, my previous trials with the rear sight had worked, and it was still sighted in.  Right now it's sighted in to hit the bull at 50 yards with 70 grains of powder and your standard 180-grain patched round ball, and I proceeded to shoot a group of big half-inch holes that showed I could kill a deer with it at that range if I needed to.  (Dad's comment was, "Boy, I'd like to see you hit a coyote with that!  I bet it'd flip him plumb over!")  For my last shot with it, I cranked it up to 85 grains just for kicks.  Fortunately, I still had more real blackpowder left than I thought, so I was able to make quite a few large blue clouds of sulfurous smoke.  I didn't have to resort to using any of the Pyrodex.

Eventually I want to do more shooting with a hotter load, say 85 grains of powder, and see how it changes the trajectory.  For more comments on shooting this gun, check out the post "My Own Favorite Fifty" listed in the sidebar.

I fired a couple of cylinders of .357 Magnum in my S&W Model 28.  My dad somehow convinced himself that .357 Magnum is too powerful for him to shoot, and that the recoil will bang the gun into his head.  This is odd, to me.  Rifle recoil is completely irrelevant to him, so I've never figured out exactly where this handgun recoil thing came from   I'm still trying to show him that this just isn't so.  So I walked up to about 10 yards from the target and blazed away as fast as I could with .357 Magnum just to show him that recoil is not a problem.

We were going to shoot his Remington 700 in 7mm Magnum but like I said, it was getting hot and we knew we had a good dinner waiting for us, so we decided to put it off until next time when we wouldn't forget to bring the chairs.

Since I'm on vacation until next Tuesday I'll probably go back and do more pistol shooting sometime soon, and maybe take some pictures next time.

The high temperature today was supposed to be only in the low 90's, but it was 95 by noon and hit 100 before the day was over.

So after a large dinner of roast, potatoes, carrots, beans and lots of iced tea, we both took impromptu naps sitting on the couch while pretending to watch "The Jeffersons" on TVLand while the kids, mom and step-grandma played Old Maid.  A good time was had by all.

From Pennsylvania News:

"It's a clear indication that there's too many guns on the street," Fox said. "(Police) get some guns off the street, only to be faced with the same people back on the street within days or weeks to commit the same type of crime over and over again."

Which is it, oh exalted one?  Maybe you should try getting people off the street instead of guns.  And keep them off the street, you know, so that "over and over again" part can stop.

What a horribly tragic situation.  One more--or even better--two more guns on the street may have helped these people to survive the encounter.

Link tnx to Thank G-d for Guns.