Kent And Guns: The Early History

I've always been interested in target practice.

I grew up in the 90's, where toy laser guns and Nerf guns ruled the day, although I did have a cap gun and one of those "tracer guns" that shoot the penny-sized plastic discs. I remember setting up paper cups and trying to knock them down with nerf guns that shot ping-pong balls. I even got in big trouble once when I found a perfect Y-shaped piece of wood, stretched a rubber-band across it, set up a crate as a target, and missed the crate and put a rock through the glass sliding door behind the crate.

Then, when I was 17 or 18, my dad handed me down his air gun, a Crossman 1377--one of the older, unrifled ones that could shoot BBs both and pellets. It had faulty O-ring, so the compressed air would leak. Then I repaired it and took to shooting all sorts of stuff--filling the barrel with water and shooting off a nice mist, blowing the dust out of my computers with it, etc. Unfortunately, my dad wasn't into guns (even though he owned--and still owns--a single-shot 12-gauge), and he placed little emphasis on safety, trusting that I was mature and would use my common sense to stay safe. I didn't know anything about safety. I was a dumb, naive kid with an air pistol, and no respect for weapons or their deadly power.

I'm still ashamed to tell this next part, but I'll tell it anyways because it needs to be told. I found that I could stick a Golf tee in the muzzle of the barrel, kinda like one of those rifle-fired grenades, where they stick a grenade on the end of a rifle, firing blanks to launch the grenade. This made for cheap ammo, since my dad was into Golf at the time and I could find a tee anywhere in the house. Plus, they were recoverable, so I could use them over and over again. One day I loaded one up and, with just one pump, I was able to arc the tee from the foyer in my parents house to my brother's room upstairs, where it struck my brother on the side of his head (evidently, not with the pointy part). It wasn't an aimed shot--I didn't intend to hit him, I just wanted to lob the tee into his room. Just to see if I could. Then, not having learned any sort of lesson from his anger, I shot my cousin's dog with another tee and a similar power level. This was the last straw. My dad took back his heirloom and threw it away. The dog, well, we've made amends--she still comes up to me (but not for the week after the shooting--she would hide in her transportation cage if I was around).

Finally I learned my lesson, or at least I didn't have the air pistol with which to make that mistake again. I went off to college and, in my junior year, one of my roommates brought back a PVC-pipe marshmallow blow-gun. Finally, here was a gun and ammo I could actually shoot people with and not have to worry about deadly consequences. I jumped right in, improving on the design to use a piston and a cylinder to deliver more power do it more consistently than lung power. I also changed the format of the gun, from a glorified blow gun (with a pair of handles for the hands and a barely aim-able shape) to a simple long-gun, with a butt-stock and a forearm. It was much more accurate and powerful and easier to operate (it depended on arm-strength rather than lung-strength) and could be fired in a wider variety of positions. I even figured out how to add a sleeve inside the barrel that had rifling, which might improve the accuracy of the marshmallows.

But it still wasn't the real thing.

Fast forward a few years: I've graduated and started a full-time job. At this job, one of the guys I worked with invited me to go shooting with him. With real guns. With real bullets. At a real range. I went to his house and, after running through a bunch of safety rules, he showed me what we would be shooting: another coworker's guns, a Heckler & Koch P7M10 and a Glock 21. We went over the manual of arms for a bit and practiced dryfiring. This time there was no immaturity. Here were real weapons that could be used to actually kill something with. Not just the varying degrees of lethality of the Crossman 1377, no; if you pull the trigger on one of these while it's pointing at a person, there would be no question that that person would die. Finally, I was experiencing the maturity and respect for the weapons I should have had, all those years ago. I was conscious of where the muzzle was pointing, ensuring that I would not "sweep" anyone while dryfiring, keeping my finger off the trigger and planted firmly on the frame until the sights were lined up.

Then we got to the range and I read each and every rule I had to sign off on twice to make sure I knew them before handling live ammunition. While we were doing this, I was buzzing with excitement and nervousness. I could hear the gunfire from the range, I could smell the burnt powder.

We paid for an hour of range-time, a few targets, 100 rounds of ammunition for each of us, donned our Eyes and Ears, and went out onto the range. My coworker clipped up his target, sent it out, and loaded one of the P7's magazines with 10 rounds and put them all downrange. Then, slide locked back and the gun on the table, he turned to me and gestured: "your turn". I stepped up to the table, loaded the magazine as he had--wow, was that painful--picked up the gun (finger off the trigger), slapped in the magazine, squeezed the grip and savored the feeling. I saw it in my mind's eye: the slide moved forward, stripped a round off the top of the magazine and pushed it into the chamber, while a split second later, the next round was pushed to the top of the magazine. In that split second, I felt all of this and heard it and knew, for the first time in my life:

I was ready to fire.

I lined up the sights, right on the X, right in the middle of the silhouette, and squeezed the trigger. In that instant, between the time the slide started to cycle back to the time the slide stopped moving forward, I knew this is for me. With a grin, I enjoyed the rest of the hour, even besting my coworker in an impromptu accuracy match. First time out shooting. And no, this wasn't with cheap, light .22LR--this was with full-recoil, service-grade .40S&W.

That first time was almost two years ago. Now, target practice has become one of my favorite (if most expensive) past-times, and I embrace everything to do with it, from the tools and technology to the ammunition to the culture, and even the political aspects.

I have found something truly unique in my little world, and I have no intention of ever letting it go.