I don't get to do it often, not since I joined the Coast Guard and moved to MA so many years ago. In Massachusetts, you have to pretty much be Jesus-Walking-on-Water to even own a firearm, let alone pop it off all willy-nilly into a giant mound of dirt on a Sunday (no sacrilege intended). I have a totally legal permit to own and carry concealed firearms in this state, but since moving here, I've never (thankfully in some case) had an opportunity to use it.
That changed a few weeks ago, when a friend of mine (who's deathly afraid of firearms) told me she had met a guy who was taking her out shooting once a week. She was slowly becoming more comfortable with guns as a result. She wanted to know if I'd like to come out and shoot with them on a Sunday (as well as tell her what I thought of her new boyfriend, a sort of .... meet the parents in minor... thing.)
I was thrilled at the chance to shoot my guns. Two years ago I bought a Glock 19 9mm (the model that now has the terrible distinction of forever being linked to the tragic events in Arizona nearly a month ago....) and a Remington 870 12 gauge shotgun. Since purchasing these weapons (legally, at a gun show in Maine) they've been pretty much sitting in our gun safe (shotgun) or in my "drawer of death" in my bedside table on my side of the bed (pistol).
Before moving to MA, I shot all the time, as a civilian and as a Law Enforcement Officer. My father and I would routinely go to the little local outdoor shooting range we belonged to and spend an afternoon shooting shit: paper targets, bottles, cans, jugs.... it wasn't a very fancy range, so people typically took garbage and threw out out into the field and shot at it.
As a cop, we would shoot usually every four to six weeks, depending on people's availability. We also had quarterly firearms-related training (Urban Rifle, shoot/no shoot scenarios, simmunitions, etc). In the Coast Guard, because I wasn't stationed in South Florida, we shot twice a year, and dragged ourselves thru a wholly outdated DVD-converted-from-VHS video which we watched individually as we crouched behind an old couch in our crew lounge. Our reactions to what we saw on the screen (which would be holstering or unholstering our deactivated service weapon, giving verbal commands to on-screen actors who couldn't hear us anyway, or making "bang" noises with our mouths to simulate shooting someone) were scored by a proctor and we were given a "pass/fail" grade on whether we could be trusted to carry a gun for the US Coast Guard.
On top of that, shooting in the CG isn't as much fun (or relaxed) as I experienced with civilian law enforcement. As a cop, we would head out to the local range, and shoot thru our courses of fire, scoring was based off of two turns, firing 50 rounds at a man-shaped target set to 25 yards. You needed a total score of 80/100 to be considered qualified. Shooting the M4 was a similar experience, but conducted outside and set to 50 and 100 yards (the tri-city SWAT team trained differently). Your qualifying took less than an hour.
With the CG, it was a whole day long. With a lot of sitting around and waiting to shoot, because they tried to cram as many shooters from the surrounding area's stations or units to the shoot as possible. This would lead to a lot of boredom, loss of interest/situational awareness, fatigue, and bad attitudes.
People who are made to wait all day with no food get cranky, it seems. Who knew?
So my last few shooting experiences have been less than home runs, needless to say. Qualifying for the CG, for me, as been hit or miss (pun intended) as well. I qualified as a Sharp Shooter with the service pistol (the terribly design Sig Sauer 229DAK in .40 cal... yuck) in basic training, but then once in the field, only qualified three out of the 6 times I went out to shoot. Shotgun and rifle were also all over the board.
Not once, ever as a cop, did I not qualify to carry. But then again, we were shooting with Glock 22s and 23s (.40 cal, full and compact, depending on your preference... I carried the model 22) with it's sweet, sweet smooth trigger pull.
Anyway, I had my friend snap some pictures of the Sunday we went shooting. It was a lot of fun, and I found out that a year-long membership to the range we were shooting at is only 50 bucks. Far cheaper than the $250 for two years they would like to charge me at the range closer to my house.
Here are the pics:
