{"id":4584,"date":"2009-11-06T14:14:45","date_gmt":"2009-11-06T19:14:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/?p=4584"},"modified":"2009-11-06T14:14:45","modified_gmt":"2009-11-06T19:14:45","slug":"no-more-pretty-targets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/?p=4584","title":{"rendered":"No More Pretty Targets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rapid Fire no Fun<\/em><\/p>\n

I’ve had a weird morning.<\/p>\n

Today I was supposed to go to the gun range with some guys from church. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that my dad went. When he found out I was going to the range, he wanted to go, in spite of the fact that Christians would be there. How about that?<\/p>\n

I wanted to go to Trail Glades, the outdoor county range I always go to, but John, the church volunteer leader who arranged the outing opted for an indoor range up north. This turned out to be a good thing. Trail Glades does not permit “rapid fire,” which means anything faster than once every five seconds. That means you can forget about three-shot drills. The range we went to is somewhat grubby and dark, but it has no speed limit.<\/p>\n

I started out with the .45 and .38 Super, and I shot very nicely. Then I noticed that John was shooting faster, and I asked him about it. He said he was practicing shooting twice to the body and once to the head. We were using silhouette targets (another thing Trail Glades does not permit), so it was easy to see how the paper perp was faring.<\/p>\n

I decided to try three-shot drills. It was pretty humiliating. Suddenly, I had to worry about target re-acquisition. I was using 5.5″ Caldwell Orange Peel targets over the heart and head of my victim, and when I switched to shooting three shots per burst, I started getting a lot of shots that were completely out of the black.<\/p>\n

I noticed a few things. First, while my Glock 26 is great for slow-firing, it took longer to get on target when shooting fast. The results weren’t great. I tried John’s Glock 17, and the vast majority of my shots stayed in the black at about 25 feet. My .45 ACP 1911 also performed well. My 1911 .38 Super wasn’t that good, although it was the first gun I tried rapid shooting with, so it makes sense that I didn’t do well.<\/p>\n

The other guy from church–his name is Joey–let me shoot a clip from his Springfield XD. I can see why people like them. The trigger pull is vastly superior to a Glock’s. And I shot it as well as the Glock 17. It was a short-barreled version in 9mm. Not sure which one.<\/p>\n

My dad was shooting a bizarre 4-shot .357 he inherited. The brand name is “Cop.” He found that it didn’t always fire. No idea why. Good thing, I guess. Now he’ll know better than to rely on it. I let him shoot the Glock 26, and he really liked it. <\/p>\n

On the way home, we dropped into a new gun store near me, and I priced a Glock 30. I think the thing to do is to get one, ditch the Glock 26, and practice rapid-fire drills. A laser now seems like a must. Why squint at tiny sights when you can look for a nice bright dot? Trying to use the sights is fun and challenging, but I don’t think challenge is a good thing when you’re ventilating an armed burglar.<\/p>\n

This experience reaffirmed my faith in long guns. A pistol is way better than nothing, but a long gun with a green laser would be far superior to anything I shot today.<\/p>\n

I think maybe I should give up on full-sized pistols. It seems like there isn’t much of a niche between compact pistols and 7.62mm carbines. A tiny Glock will do nearly anything a big Glock will do; if you need more oomph, you should probably reach for a folding carbine. That’s my guess.<\/p>\n

After we shot, we hung around the front of the gun range clinging to our Bibles and bashing immigrants. Which didn’t go all that well, since one of us was born in Trinidad and another was Cuban. But we really tried. We felt we owed it to Janet Napolitano to prove how bigoted and ignorant Christians are.<\/p>\n

Yeah, if there is one thing Yesterday’s events prove, it’s that Christians are the ones the government should be watching. I don’t know how we got a peace-loving Muslim to shoot up Fort Hood, but I’m sure Bill Maher could explain it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rapid Fire no Fun I’ve had a weird morning. Today I was supposed to go to the gun range with some guys from church. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that my dad went. When he found out I was going to the range, he wanted to go, in spite of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-god","category-guns-hunting-fishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}