Barb’s son Max, his friend Mikel, and I went to an Airsoft range last Sunday. It was the first time for Mikel and I. I was a little uncomfortable aiming and shooting what looked very much like a real gun at real people. That uncomfortable feeling went away when people started shooting at me. It’s strange how that works. I returned fire and got my share of “kills” and was on the winning side about 70% of the time. It’s not something I would do again on my own, but if someone wanted me to go with them I probably would agree just to be social.

On the way home Mikel asked how the rental Airsoft guns compared to real guns in terms of weight. Max and I told him a little lighter on average and the magazines were much lighter. I followed up with an offer to take him to the range and shoot some real guns if he wanted. He agreed and I was able to get a complete bay to ourselves for Tuesday evening.

I started him out on a .22 pistol with a suppressor. I taught him grip, stance, sight alignment, trigger prep, trigger squeeze, and follow through. Then I had him do dry fire to practice what I had just taught him. Then it was live fire with subsonic ammo. He did well. This is Mikel (with fogged up safety glasses) and his first target after 20 rounds at about five yards:

Next, no suppressor with high velocity ammo. He continued to do well and we moved the target out to about seven yards. His groups opened up some but they were still inside the rings.

I then at five yards had him shoot five rounds as fast as he could shoot while keeping them inside the rings as he rotating around the four targets while on the shot timer. He continued to keep his cool and keep them within the rings even as he shot faster and faster.

Next I got out a .22 revolver and told him this was the lightest gun I owned. And I put my STI Eagle on the bench and told him that was my heaviest handgun. He compared the two and expressed some surprise.

He fired the revolver single action, then double action, and expressed, both verbally and with his group size, a preference for single action.

Next he did some dry fire with the STI Eagle. To my surprise there was a jerk of the gun when he pulled the trigger on an empty gun. I mentioned this and he said he was anticipating what he expected would happen when it was loaded. Max had told him it would have a lot more recoil. Okay then! We’re going to have fun with this!

I had him dry fire until long past the time the flinch was completely gone. Then I put in a loaded magazine (with very low powered .40 S&W loads) and pretended to put a round in the chamber. “Now, shoot just like with the dry fire”, I told him. There was a click and a big flinch. Gotcha!

I again pretended to put a round in the chamber and reminded him, “Trigger prep, sight alignment, squeeze, follow through. Just like with the empty gun.” No flinch. Again an empty chamber. No flinch. Then a loaded chamber. The bullet went into the bottom of the bullseye at five yards. Again and again he shot. 18 rounds and all near the bottom of the bull into about a 1.5 inch group. Nice. Another 18 rounds in the next target. And again, good shooting. I asked him to remember what his target looked like and I took him to another bay where people were shooting and showed him the targets people were shooting as well as the targets in the garbage cans. Most of them had such a wide pattern there wasn’t even a hint of a group near the rings.

Then I gave him Major Power Factor loads with two of the light loads on the top of the magazine so he could compare the easily. I could hear a significant difference as well as see the increased recoil from the heavier loads. He still kept the rounds on target with only an occasional stray out of the black.

“Okay, now what do you want to do?” I asked. “You can do more handgun shooting of whatever gun you want or you can shoot the AR-15s”, I told him. He was unsure. I then offered to set up multiple targets where he could move and shoot with the handgun. He lit up at this and so we put out five USPSA targets at various distances. I started him about five yards from the closest target, the second to the right at about 10 yards, and the remaining three to the right of that at about 15 yards from his starting position. I told him to start at the low ready, go slow, be safe, put two rounds on each target, move and shoot however he thought would be best to get almost all A-zone hits. He did great on the safety issue and I told him to go a little faster if he wanted. I think he shot the stage four times getting his time down into the 17 second range with reasonable hits most of the time.

Max then shot the stage a few times. Good hits with times in the 15 second range.

They asked if I wanted to shoot it so I shot it two different ways. The first was without moving. Just shooting all the targets from the start position. Something over seven seconds with five A-zone hits and five C-zone hits. The second attempt was while moving and shooting with me ending up about three feet from the last few targets. My time was in the fives with seven A-zone hits and three C-zone hits. They seemed to be impressed.

We cleaned up the range, packed up, washed up, and went outside to talk for a while. I told Mikel the five shots on five targets was practice for steel challenge events and that if he wanted he could shoot that type of match now with his skill set and not be embarrassed. I explained that it is difficult to do extremely well, but it’s easy to “Not suck”. I then told him about a couple flavors of action shooting. I described the problem solving and difficult shooting positions. And to just let me know if he wanted to go shooting again or shoot in a match.

He seemed very enthusiastic and thanked me. In my mind, I was thanking him for giving me an opportunity to bring another person onto our team.

Kelsey recently joined my team at work. Like Caity, when she first joined the team full time, there was a minor flaw. Everyone else on our team knows how to shoot and enjoys guns. Kelsey is very quiet and difficult for me to read. I wasn’t sure whether to discuss this issue with her or not. Over the course of a few weeks it came out that she was interested in learning to shoot so I reserved the training bay for 12:00 –> 2:00 (they only do two hour blocks) today. It turned out our boss gave us all the afternoon off since we have to work part of Sunday this weekend so Kelsey and I weren’t rushed when we visited the range.

I started her out with a suppressed Ruger Mark III 22/45 with subsonic ammo at five yards.

That went well. I didn’t take a picture of the target after the first eight shots, but here you can see the target after 18 rounds:

The first eight shots were the three at the bottom, and then a vertical hole of five shots you could cover with a nickel. The one wild shot at the top was near the end of the second magazine.

I had forgotten to tell her to keep the front sight in focus. We talked about that a bit and then she went on to a .22 revolver. I had her fire it single action with CCI CBs:

That went well:

Okay, now a challenge, and the reason I seldom recommend revolvers. Shooting a revolver in double action mode:

Again, a couple wild shots near the end of the string. But the rest of the shots are really rocking it for a new shooter with any handgun, let alone a double action revolver. She learns fast!

I gave her a choice, learning to shoot faster, move to a larger caliber gun, or more precision shooting with the Ruger. She choose more precision shooting with the semi-auto.

I was amazed. This is 10 rounds at five yards:

These were shots 37 through 46 in her entire life. She only once even held a gun in her hands before (so she says).

This is after 20 rounds:

Okay. She’s a pro. There is nothing I can teach her about this type of shooting. We have to move on to something else. She is going to get bored putting so many bullets through a single hole.

I put up a paper with four bull’s-eye targets and told her to put one round on each bullseye. Keep it in the black or smaller, but shoot faster. She did a couple strings of five shots each. She shot quite a bit faster, but about half the bullets were in the 10 ring.

Uhh… nice.

I told her she can go faster still, “Just keep them in the black. As soon as the sights are lined up somewhere within the black, squeeze off the last 20% of the trigger pull”. “Oh”, she replied, “I can do that.” And she did. Hmm… I need to push her more.

I pulled out the shot timer and went through the range commands with her: “1) Make ready. 2) Are you ready? 3) Standby…BEEP!” Got that? Good. Let’s try it.

And I finally pushed her into failure. With four shots, one bullet barely nicked the bottom of the paper, and one missed on the right side of the paper entirely. Ah! Now we have something I can teach her!

Shooting fast, particularly in competition, is a mind game. A little bit of stress can make everything fall apart. Don’t let the timer or the shooter next to you, with their own set of plates competing for the first to complete, affect how you shoot. You shoot your targets your way, just like you did in practice. Let’s try it again.

She got it. From the low ready she was able to get five shots into five targets (one of the targets twice) in six point something seconds. All her splits were less than a second.

We had used up all our range time so we cleaned up the range and as we returned to the lobby to wash up I asked her to walk slowly past the shooters in the next bay and look at the targets the other shooters were producing. I told her, “There won’t be any targets even close to what you did today”. I was right. There wasn’t a pattern on any of the targets I could have completely covered with both of my hands spread wide.

We went on to the lobby and I finished washing first. I grabbed her 20 round target and showed it to the range officer behind the counter. She was as amazed as I was and pulled up Kelsey’s profile in their database and made a note of something about “A legend has been reborn.”

Kelsey earned her new shooter smile and she is now a complete member of our team: