Well, the Small Child had his long awaited 11th birthday this week which means he is now legally allowed to go the range and shoot stuff! Yep one more weird-arse quirk of Qld Police Service’s Weapons Licensing Act. In the great state of Qld, you need to be 18 to vote, 18 to drink, 17 to drive and 11 to go shoot guns! How on earth they decided 11 was a suitable age for young people to be handling firearms I don’t know… but there you have it.
So I took him out to the range for the day at one of our RAM (Real Adventure Men) Days which are subsidized shooting days that our club runs every couple of months to encourage non-licensed shooters to come along and have a go.
First cab off the rank was 12ga shotgun clays. I saw it on the activity sheet and thought, ‘Oh great, let’s give a kid whose never really shot an air rifle a shotgun to cut his teeth on!’. :S And then of course we get down there and they have these very heavy shotguns with 28” barrels that are almost as big as he is and that he can hardly hold up let alone operate and then let’s give him a moving clay pigeon target! Talk about throwing him in at the deep end! But he did okay. Admittedly the instructor was loading for him because he couldn’t break it (hell, half the time I can’t!) but eventually he got his eye in and managed to get off a good shot and hit a pigeon. Never seen such a huge smile on his face 🙂
Next we moved onto black powder pistols which are always heaps of fun because they’re a bit more hands on, you get a bit grubby playing around with gun powder, big lead balls, beeswax and stuff. Then there’s lots of big teeth rattling booms and smoke and coughing and all good stuff like that 🙂 The Small Child had a go at loading a .40 cal black powder revolver and had five shots to fire. He managed to get three of the five shots on the target which was pretty good considering some of them kick like a mule!
After that we moved onto .22 semi-auto pistols (Ruger Mk III 22/45s), which are so much smaller when compared to the black powder revolver and have absolutely not recoil to speak of, but he didn’t seem to take to it as easily and there was no big satisfying BANG. So, even though the gun is smaller and should have been easier to handle, and the targets were closer and should have been easier to hit – his shots weren’t as accurate and it certainly wasn’t his favourite activity of the day, which surprised me a bit, cos most of the young guys I’ve had out there like the semi-auto rapid fire fun.
After we had a bit of lunch we went onto using some Ruger and Smith & Wesson .38 revolvers. Much, much heavier, a helluva lot more kick and somewhat fussier to use than the semi-autos… but he absolutely loved the revolver and his shots all landed true with it too, so he was fantastic with it. He handled it like a pro and came home saying that was his favourite activity of the day and that ‘we need to buy a revolver, Mum!’ Yep, no worries kid, I’ll just go put in another PTA and spend a small tonne of cash to buy another gun because you like revolvers and oh no wait! You can’t join the pistol club until you’re 16. Bummer.
He also had a go at .22 rifles which he managed easily and found a little boring after playing with pistols! Love the screwed up concentration on his face while he was shooting. 😀 Then onto .223 rifles which gave him a big of a fright at first, but he got the hang of them too and managed to get a few on his fox head target. All up, we had a great day and I was really pleased with him for his awareness on the range, his sense of safety with the firearms, his ability to follow instructions and for being able to take the whole thing seriously while still having fun.
And at the end of the day, The Small Child’s verdict: “Real guns are nothing like guns on computers, Mum!” 😉 Totally worth if for that if nothing else!