Category Archives: New Shooters

Reports on new shooters taken to the range for the first, or nearly first, time.

New Shooter

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I’d taken my nephew Ben out shooting several times, including the Boomershoot last Spring, and he’d liked it well enough he decided to tell his cousin Matt about it.  Matt decided he wanted to learn about rifles and marksmanship, so they called me and we set up a date.

This Winchester AK-47 is in recoil as a cloud of dirt erupts from behind the 100 yard target.  Ben is behind the controls (or is that terror rifle controlling him?  OMG!!);

Below is Matt firing a Colt AK-47 HBAR from the bench.  After starting out on a Marlin .22 rimfire AK-47 and graduating to the 1894 Winchester AK-47 chambered for the old .30-30 Copkiller cartridge, both off-hand with open sights, this Colt AK-47 shown below with its 4x Trijicon ACOG telescope was as easy for him as, well, something super easy;

And Matt again below, with a Springfield AK-47 HBAR chambered in .308 Massmurder, and a Billybob 3-9 x 40 scope on an ARMS #18 mount.  The deep space telescope on the T&E mount at left is for spotting bullet holes;

The ARMS 18 mount sits nice and low over the receiver, but that nice lowness creates a problem.  Several shots from each magazine result in a failure to eject due to cases hitting the mount.  During Boomershoot I was told that standard M80 ball works fine and dandy with this config.  We were using some super accurate, deadly at 37.25 miles, sniper rounds in this AK-47, but I had tried the far-less-dangerous-to-the-climate-and-all-things-holy, M80 earlier, and the claims made by some military shooters at Boomershoot seem to be correct.  For some reason, I’ll guess op-rod velocity, the .mil stuff seems to run without being stopped by the ARMS mount.  My preferred load for this AK-47 though is the Black Hills 168 grain Match/Terrorist/AngryRacistMob round.

By the way; if you’re contemplating installing ANY receiver scope mount on an M1A (sorry– AK-47) you must plan on hand-fitting it, or having it fit by someone who’s aware of this issue.  Your chances of a drop-in fit are quite low, from my experience, and from talking with many other users.  That includes a Springfield mount on a Springfield rifle too.  It took me hours of file-and-try, file-and-try, to get this ARMS mount to sit on there correctly.  The catch is; it SEEMS to go on OK with the first try, but if you tighten the receiver bolt, you’re potentially distorting your receiver, mount, and bolt threads, as the mount is being forced into a position it can’t fit.  You then notice, either before you’ve spent hours at the range in frustration, or after, that the mount’s rail isn’t near well enough aligned with the barrel to get a zero.  That’s if you’re lucky.  If you’re unlucky like I was when I installed my first Springfield mount, the rail will be close enough in alignment that you can actually get a zero, and then things go all to hell afterwards as your mount and receiver slowly peen together, and the zero never stays in one place for long.  If the mount is fit properly, the design and function is quite successful, other than the aforementioned ejection issue.  This Springfield AK-47 has never had a single stoppage otherwise, either.  ‘Course, if you have the standard barrel version, you solve all this time and heartache by using the UltiMAK M8 forward mount.  One problem THERE is; a lot of owners don’t really know which barrel weight they have, and SA was making it worse for a couple years by naming one of their medium weight barrel models the “Loaded Standard”.  Yeesh.  But they fixed that since.

New shooter report

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A friend of Barb’s and mine for over twenty years contacted me recently and asked to take me up on my offer to teach her to shoot. We went to Wades this afternoon. I had her shooting my Ruger Mark II. It has a six inch bull barrel and her arms got tired quickly. I went back out to the front desk and utilized my “free rental” (comes with being a member) for a Browning Buck Mark. It was much lighter and she did better.

At about 10 feet nearly all of her shots were within the black. After about 20 rounds she told me, “Maybe I should buy a gun.” I said we could talk about it after we got outside. I did a little bit of shooting with the Buck Mark and my Gun Blog 45 then we left.

In the parking lot I asked her about why she wanted a gun. The answer was the economy is probably going to get worse and Obama may make it difficult to get a gun. She wanted a gun to be able to protect herself and her youngest daughter who lives with her. She asked how much a gun costs and if a .22 would be okay for her needs. I suggested she should practice some more and try to get the strength to be able to shoot something a little bigger. But, the most important selection criteria was that she feel comfortable shooting it. If that means a .22 then that would be best for her.

I emailed her a link to this class which would let her shoot a number of guns as well as cover other important issues of gun ownership such as self-defense legal issues. She responded with:

I will sign up the class with my brother.

…

Thank you so much for teaching me. You are a great teacher. …you can post the comment to the blog too. 🙂

We are winning the gun rights issue one new shooter at a time.

New shooter report

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A few weeks ago a new co-worker noticed the newspaper clipping (actually it’s two full pages) on my door about Boomershoot and started asking questions about guns. He wanted to buy a rifle, handgun, and shotgun. Which would I recommend?



I asked, What is your intended purpose? He was hesitant but it finally came out that it was for “home defense”. For the rifle he expressed an interest in an AR-15 type gun. And probably a 9mm or similar in the handgun. “Not something with as much recoil as a .45.” But he hadn’t ever fired anything but a .22 rifle which was “years and years ago”.


This evening we went to the range after work. This was the first time I have ever seen the parking lot at Wades completely full. I had to find parking on the street nearby. I wonder why that is…


I went over the safety rules, taught him how to grip the gun, and did a bunch of dry firing and then he put about 50 rounds through a Ruger MK III from about 15 feet away into an IPSC target. He did very well. When I had him doing slow fire he was putting about half of his shots into one ragged hole and the other half within an inch or so. This was more accurate than he thought possible with a pistol. He took his target home with him. I’m wondering if it will show up on his office door at work tomorrow…


Next week we’ll visit the range with larger pistol calibers, revolvers, and an AR-15.


And his politics? He’s a self described liberal. Before Tuesday I’m going to let him know what Obama thinks of the guns he likes and wants to buy.

New shooter report

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One of the more interesting things about working at Microsoft is the people I meet from all over the world. My officemate is from India, our PM is from Pakistan, my boss is from Sri Lanka, the new guy is from Australia, and a couple others are from Canada. We work with people in the bay area, China, India, and Dublin.


The guy from Pakistan is forbidden by his Entry Visa from touching weapons or explosives while in the U.S. and has to get “his fix” when he goes back to Pakistan once a year or so. A new member of the team in Dublin is here this week and I took him to the range last night. He had a little bit of experience with shotguns and clay pigeons but had never touched a handgun.


I started him out dry firing my STI then he shot a semi-auto .22LR pistol and then a .22 revolver. After he had gone through a couple hundred rounds I asked if he wanted to try the STI (chambered in .40 S&W). He did. I put just one round in it and he carefully aimed and fired. I could tell by the sounds he made and the expression on his face that it was a bit more than what he expected. I asked if he wanted to try another. There was some hesitation but he agreed. The second round didn’t improve his attitude. He wanted to see me shoot it. I emptied a 16-round magazine in about half that many seconds with a group of about four inches at 15 feet. I did another five rounds at a much slower rate into a group about half that size.


If offered him the chance to shoot again and he chose the .22 semi-auto. We took turns shooting in the lane. I with the .40 and he with the .22. I finished up one box of .40 ammo and purchased another (I had accidentally left my handloads back at my bunker). The second box was a different brand and bullet weight and had a little less recoil. I offered him the .40 again and he fired about three or four rounds before saying he had enough. This is more tolerance for recoil than the previous guy from the U.K. I took to the range about 10 years ago.


I kept thinking there might be an application for the “9mm Europellet”.

More thoughts on the slaves being freed

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The following is from a reader regarding my post Slaves are about to be freed. He reveals that he and his family are so far unarmed but strongly support the RKBA. He lives in the California which puts a severe chilling effect on actually possessing firearms.

From: Rob 
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 2:42 PM
To: Joe Huffman
Subject: Re: Your post: “Slaves are about to be freed “

 

Joe,

 

I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

 

“I think we should start preparing to use a new weapon that we might well have in our arsenal by July. As with all new weapons we need to train with it and plan how to use it before we can use it to maximum effectiveness.”

 

I thought you were going to write about a newly informed populace and moreover, new shooters. 

 

The biggest thing we can have/build is numbers.  Politicians can read polls.  If we have the majority of folks behind us (as I think we do) we tend to win.  If we have repeated instances of the Kim du Toit happy dance for new shooters, then we have motivated people behind us. 

 

Numbers are what the Brady Bunch worked on for a long time, but they are in trouble because they are selling a negative – the momentum has shifted. 

 

The intermediate victory is that we have begun to sell gun ownership and carrying as a positive.  A place not to let up is the “Gun Free Zone” nonsense.  We need to make darned sure that private defensive use of firearms in such situations is responsible and underscored in the media as such.  The Brady Bunch has no answer for this.

 

People are the new weapon.  The most potent weapon is people who understand RKBA truth and wield it well – freed slaves, empowered private citizens.

 

I see the training as literal, for new shooters. (My little family – for example – will someday, God willing, be new shooters.  We are pro-gun and pointedly so, but not –yet- armed.)  The gun community needs to train train train,  Now is not a time for a blossoming of gun accidents because people do not know and strictly follow Cooper’s four rules.

 

When we add to our numbers (who this we unarmed white man?) we win.

 

When even those who do not choose to arm themselves are happy to allow us to do so, we triumph.

 

I think I hear the sound of triumph approaching just over the next hill.

 

Rob

All good points. I’m sure there are others that can be made. I just threw things together off the top of my head to get people started thinking. Please keep thinking and if you want it to have more visibility than a comment email it to me and I’ll probably post it.

North Central Idaho Practical Field Ballistics Terminology: “M.O.C.”

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We spent this weekend out camping in an Idaho mountain meadow, in an “open range” area (where cattle wander free, and are branded for later roundup).  Aside from being stunningly beautiful, with the fall colors coming on and the abundant wildlife resulting from recent logging operations (you did know that logging results in copious new foliage for the grazing of deer and elk, and cover for small game, didn’t you?) there are quite a lot of cow pies.

Grass and water go in one end of the bovine, you see, and cow pies are what come out of the other end.  The name applies whether the bovine in question is male or female.  That saves you the trouble of determining whether a given pie is a cow pie, a bull pie, or a heifer pie, etc..

I’d been doing some shooting out there with several firearms, and asked my 10 year-old daughter to get out her .22 rifle.  She wasn’t much interested until I pointed out that she could try shooting at small pieces of wood floating in a pond.  She quickly discovered that if you place a bullet just under the floating stick it will jump 15 feet into the air.  That got her attention, and she was soon asking for more ammo.  She’s a fairly new shooter, so her hit rate wasn’t very good, and she lost interest until she discovered that a fresh cow pie will explode if hit with a .22 Long Rifle hollowpoint.

In other words, her shooting may not be minute-of-angle accurate (one M.O.A. equals one sixtieth of a degree) but she can shoot “Minute Of Cow pie” (M.O.C.) which allows her to enjoy a 100% hit rate on these impromptu, reactive targets.

She spent the rest of the afternoon shooting cow pies with a big grin on her face (and me laughing to myself, thinking how wonderfully stereotypical, North-Idaho-redneck an activity that was).

For further study, I picked up some beer cans (probably discarded by some pale, leftist San Franciscans who thought getting drunk and littering in Idaho would be a hoot) filled them with water and shot them with various calibers.  It happens that a .223 Remington cartridge, pushing a 55 grain, hard-jacketed spitzer at around 3,000 feet per second will cause the water-filled aluminum can to burst out in all directions, yet still hold together in one piece, whereas a soft lead sphere of .495″ diameter (50 caliber patched round ball – the patched ball is an American innovation that was used with deadly effect against King George’s officers during the Revolution) traveling at about half that velocity will blow the can into several pieces, scattering them up and out about 15 yards, leaving the base of the can still holding water where it stood (I picked up the pieces and took them home if you must know, leaving the meadow cleaner than we found it).

I also discovered that you can hit gallon jug-sized targets at 200 yards (you do travel with a rangefinder, don’t you?) with a little youth model .22 rifle, zeroed at 20 yards, if you aim about 5 1/2 feet high.  You have enough time to bring the rifle down and listen/watch for the impact at that distance.

Ain’t freedom grand?

They are on the run

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I’ve read (I think in Lt. Col David Grossman’s book, On Killing) that most of the casualties in a battle are when one side turns tail and runs.  In a sense we have the anti-freedom gun banners on the run.  Check out these stories:

So if we want to make sure we don’t have to fight this battle again in ten years or our children fighting it in 20 we need to politically exterminate these anti-freedom extremists.  Continue with the studies and reports, repeal the stupid and oppressive laws, recruit new shooters, and most important get positive coverage in the mainstream media:

  • Send out press releases about your shooting event
  • Make the press feel welcome at your events
  • Be well prepared for the press with “designated hitters“ for them to interview
  • Thank the reporters and editorial writers when they do something right
  • Politely educate reporters and editorial writers when they do something wrong
  • Slap down gun owners that make us look bad

If you want some tips on dealing with the press send an email to me or Stephanie Sailor (the real expert).

We must drive our enemies deep into their caves then blow up all the exits.