Guns are scary stuff!!

Howdy Howdy...

Today my roommate Mike and I went out to an indoor shooting range here in Calgary (The Shooting Edge). We were both quite interested in going to this place to shoot off handguns to see what it really is like and all about. This place will let you come in and use their equipment and all you do is sign your life away saying you're not going to sue if you get hurt, you pay an entrance fee of $32 and you can pick any gun they have in their rent out case and then you buy the ammo. Mike and I both picked 9mm handguns and the ammo was $25 for a box of 50 bullets.

Mike first chose a Glock 17 (quite common in law enforcement) Pictured below:



I then picked a SIG Sauer 226 (I remembered reading about SIG's somewhere) also pictured here:



So we get a safety briefing, and they show us how to load the ammo into the magazine clip and give us a target and pretty much let us go at it. So we set up or targets on one of those zip lines and sent the targets out about 7 meters. We then proceeded to load the magazine clips with 10 bullets, load the clip and my favorite part was to load the barrel where you pull the top part of the gun back and then release it quickly to load a bullet into the chamber.

Now Mike and I were both a little nervous. Mike fired first and holy crap was it loud. So loud that I was now even more nervous. I line up my sights and pulled the trigger. BAM! Holy crapola!!! What force. Never expected that much recoil. I then looked at the target and saw that I hit nothing!!! I was blown away (not literally of course) at the amount of power these guns had. Between the noise and recoil it was certainly an eye opener. I will never look at one the same anymore. I was holding on hard with 2 hands and there was no way I was going to try and fire one handed as it was just too forceful. Forget all those gangster rappers out there holding the guns sidewayz and firing with ease. Pff... I had two hands steady and aiming at a target not far away and I was missing the freaking thing altogether. I have no idea where those bullets were going.

Mike and I switched guns for a little bit and had a try at each. The Glock was a much lighter gun, but had a hair trigger and packed a bigger punch than the SIG. The SIG was heavier and was a little easier to shoot, but both of these guns demanded respect and constant attention. We shot for about 15mins as you had to reload the clips after every 10shots, which is good because it gives you time to cool down as the adrenaline was pumping as we shot these destructive machines.

It was a great experience but I must say, I was very intimidating by the gun while we were there. Mike and I of course couldn't stop talking about it afterwards and we had grins ear to ear, but while we were in there it was quite a different story.

I hit the target 29 times out of 50 which is freaking awful!!!! Don't give me no gun! These are pretty hard to shoot accurately and if I was going to do it again, I'd research and get tips on how to fire them more accurately (stance and holding techniques etc.)

Here's a pic of my target:



So it was quite the experience. I wasn't quite expecting the force and scariness of these guns. They are certainly not to be toyed around with, and to think if you had to quickly pick one up and aim and shoot at someone... wow... good luck is all I can say... aim for the center of the person because there is no way in hell you're going to be able to shoot a leg or foot to just injure someone slightly... you'll miss everytime. I tried 10 times for a head shot and just look above at how many times I came close to the head!

Anyways... I'll likely do it again sometime in the future... but man oh man... it opened my eyes.