Firing Squads

Ever since we acquired our first gun, just before our cross country trip, the family has enjoyed learning to fire guns while also learning weapons safety. After we arrived in Idaho was when we were actually able to begin learning this as a family. We began our journey with the .40 calibre Baretta, we gained a hunting rifle that used to be his father in Florida's. Two weekends ago, John went down to help settle the affairs of his father's estate and brought home two more guns, much to the boy's glee. One of which was a 12 gauge semi automatic shotgun that can fire three rounds with simple successive pulls of its trigger. The second was a smaller hunting rifle, equipped with a nice scope.


This past weekend was a beautiful weekend, after a couple of weeks of much rain and clouds. We took advantage of the sunshine and packed up our guns, both old and new, and took to the hills. Any place outside of the city limits is open for shooting a gun. We happened on a place in our off-roading trips in the jeep that had several pull off spots where people would go for target practice. It wasn't too far from the house, which was also a welcome improvement over our previous 45 mile trips to a shooting range we knew of.




The boys, and I must admit me included, absolutely loved shooting the shotgun. We found many unbroken clay pigeons in the area and took turns tossing them into the air for one another. David got one on his first shot, but the rest of us struggled to get any after that. I have personally found moving targets to be much more difficult, but i was able to shoot every shotgun shell off a platform about 20 meters in front of me with the Baretta. I felt pretty good about that and John started calling me Calamity Jane. All in all we had a blast and I know at least two of us with quite visible bruises from that shotgun! Still, I'm sure we'll all go out again soon and won;t hesitate to fire it over and over again in our feeble attempts to hit those little clay pigeons. >.<