I stayed home all weekend and watched Law and Order in my bedroom. Scintillating activity in itself but by Sunday I was bored with the end of my 7 day weekend. Luckily I got a phone call from Joshy at 11am (Earliest he has been up evah!) asking me if I wanted to go to Belmont and shoot some guns with him and Caroline. I had said yes before he'd even finished asking me the question.
Welcome to the Lone Ranges Shooting Complex.
These posters were in our training room. Our training consisted of a 'Range Officer' making a lot of innapropriate jokes and me embarassing myself by not being able to pull the clip back on a semi-auto. Apparantly quite a lot of police officers load their magazines in backwards and then ask why their guns aren't working.
We opted for the first timers package which came with training and 50 .22 rounds, half to be shot with a pistol, half with a semi auto, which came to a grand total of $75. Also included in that price is a casual membership to da Gun Klub, and you get a laminated card proving that. I got a tad confused and wrote down 1987 instead of 2010 so I've been a member for 23 years.
This is Caroline. She'd had a heavy weekend and freaked out a little bit but pulled through in the end.
FULLY LOADED PISTOL! Also that's me shooting the semi auto. I was so fucking rubbish/amazing at it that I managed to hit the target once, and then shoot both the pegs off. On the way out this lord of a Range Officer heard me saying that and said he'd heard me before I went into the booth saying I was going to do that. I liked this guy. He looked like a biff gun nut version of Uncle Buck, and he promptly took a shining to Joshy and I and let us do some sick stuff. Like hold one of these.
Then he showed us a sawn off shotgun, the favourite weapon of leather vested motorcycle enthusiasts everywhere. Josh and I decided we wanted to shoot it.
Shooting a shotgun fucking hurts. I still hurt today on Tuesday and I'm loaded on panadeine forte. It's also really loud and scary. I definitely want one of these, not to shoot, but to wave around in the air, like I just don't care.
After we'd shot the shotgun, our awesome friend Gun Nut Uncle Buck took us into a booth with no cameras in it and gave us the .44 Magnum. This is a serious gun. Every time I shot it I'm pretty sure it FLEW LIKE SUPERMAN into the air.
To demonstrate the difference in amazingness between normal .44 bullets and hollowtip bullets, also known as 'peoplestoppers' Uncle Buck let us shoot some. The holes from the normal bullets in the target still had a tiny bit of tear in the back of the paper while the peoplestoppers looked like someone had holepunched it with a holepunch made for giants.
I left Belmont feeling incredibly fucking tough and like I needed to drink 5L of beer, which is what I then did. Now that I can't drink for 6 weeks I have a feeling that I will be at this place every weekend, smiling maniacally while shooting guns into a picture of Oktoberfest.
