...and rather difficult when firing on full auto.

A few weeks before the holidays I had the pleasure of going to one of the local gun ranges with Dopple-G and The Godfather. That's The Godfather of child #1, as opposed to the Godfather of child #2, who would be Dopple-G himself.

It was a blast. I haven't done a lot of weapon firing in my life. In fact I believe there were a total of 3 occurences before this trip to the range. The first was as a youngster, maybe 9 or 10, while down at Uncle Namesake's farm. One day everybody loaded up into the Suburban and went to the firing range. I had a fun time with the .22 rifle and then a very painful time with the .30-06 rifle (which I fired exactly once and nursed a sore shoulder for the next couple of days).

The second was in boot camp. This was Navy boot camp so small arms received only a passing nod. The Navy concentrates on somewhat larger munitions, after all. After receiving familiarization and safety instruction I got to fire one clip from a .45automatic pistol converted to fire .22 ammunition at a target about 15 feet away. The experience was less that satisfactory. It was basically the same as the average first person arcade shooter, only the gun I was using had less recoil.

The third time was fun. That was with an M-16 during impromptu war games as a Marine attachment attacked us during a Fleet Hospital training evolution. Of course that was blanks with that giant red barrel cover in place but it was still much fun.

This trip trounced the others though. I fired a couple boxes of 9mm through a Heckler & Koch 9mm pistol and also got to play with a bunch of sub-machine guns including an H&K MP5, Colt 9mm SMG and a Thomson M1A1 (the infamous Tommy Gun).

I now know without the slightest shred of a doubt that every action hero movie ever made gives not even the slightest passing nod to the actual physics involved when firing an automatic weapon.

And what's even better - it turns out I'm a natural shot. At the farthest range (25 yards) I was getting 8 or 9 of my pistol shots into the sillhouette target's sweet spots. This is good as it means I know I can adequately protect my family. Provided the assailant stands very still as I squeeze off 10 shots, I can hit him 8 or 9 times before he even gets in my drive way. If I had a gun. Which I don't.

Firing the submachine guns was very cool. The MP5 was incredibly easy to fire and very accurate on semi-auto. On full auto it climbs very rapidly, getting inaccurate in a fraction of a second. I definitely understand why these things normally have burst file available. The Colt was okay but definitely wasn't my favorite. Dopple-G loved that one. The Tommy Gun was amazing. I'll just say that .45 fired from a WWII machine gun has about 3 times the kick of 9mm from a modern gun. Now that's playing with power.

Here are a couple vids of me on the range, for your viewing pleasure. The files are pretty large so you may want to right click and "save as".

Jim fires an HK 9mm pistol (4 MB) This is a very light pistol, note how high the barrel rises and then glory at my mastery at how quickly I correct back to firing position.

Jim fires a Colt 9mm submachinegun (6.2 MB) This one got quite fun after I switched to full auto.

Jim fires a Tommy Gun (6.2 MB) Wow, what a kick!