Fifteen Rounds Later
When I was on the pistol team during my illustrious career with the Navy, I always marvelled at how a typical pistol team day would consist of each shooter firing between forty-five and seventy rounds. The poor schmucks on the rifle team, on the other hand, had to wear these ludicrous looking shooting jackets, and they fired a maximum of about twenty rounds a day.
Today I went out shooting. I took eight gallon juice jugs filled with water, and arranged them in four columns of two so that from my vantage point, I was looking at four jugs. The first round was a little high; the second round blew everything to hell.
For those who aren't familiar with rifle calibers, I was shooting an 8mm Mauser, the standard infantry rifle of the German Wehrmacht during World War II. It's a bolt action weapon with a five round internal magazine, loaded using stripper clips. The current standard American rifle, the M-16A(X), and the standard British infantry rifle, the SA-80, fire 5.56mm ammunition. The Russian AK-47 family of rifles fires a 7.62mm round, which is what the American M-14 service rifle fired before it was almost completely replaced by the M-16. This round is bigger than all of them.
So that second round hit one (or two?) of the jugs, and the tight cluster of eight jugs was blown all to hell. A single target somehow survived the first ten shots completely intact, so the entire final magazine of five rounds was focused on that single remaining jug. Let me tell you, folks, from any distance, a direct hit sends a plastic jug (or rather, pieces of a previously intact plastic jug) flying as far as twenty or thirty feet. This ain't your granddaddy's .22, my friends.
Did it relieve some stress? A little. It forced me to calm down and concentrate on something. It forced me to be slow, calculated, and precise. It also reminded me of one of the things that I'm really somewhat good at: near-surgical accuracy with two out of three rounds... On open sights. With a scope, I'm downright lethal. I've taken down a deer and an elk, each with one shot. The shot that took that elk (scoped) was damn near poetry in motion; Lycan and his Wulf Pack couldn't have been any more prodigious at a hunting if they were wearing little wulf running shoes by New Balance.
Now if I could just be a little less erratic with a 9 mil, I'd be ready to audition for the Navy SEALs. That's right, folks, I said audition. Knowing now just how talented I am with high caliber rifles, do you really want to call me on it?
Today I went out shooting. I took eight gallon juice jugs filled with water, and arranged them in four columns of two so that from my vantage point, I was looking at four jugs. The first round was a little high; the second round blew everything to hell.
For those who aren't familiar with rifle calibers, I was shooting an 8mm Mauser, the standard infantry rifle of the German Wehrmacht during World War II. It's a bolt action weapon with a five round internal magazine, loaded using stripper clips. The current standard American rifle, the M-16A(X), and the standard British infantry rifle, the SA-80, fire 5.56mm ammunition. The Russian AK-47 family of rifles fires a 7.62mm round, which is what the American M-14 service rifle fired before it was almost completely replaced by the M-16. This round is bigger than all of them.
So that second round hit one (or two?) of the jugs, and the tight cluster of eight jugs was blown all to hell. A single target somehow survived the first ten shots completely intact, so the entire final magazine of five rounds was focused on that single remaining jug. Let me tell you, folks, from any distance, a direct hit sends a plastic jug (or rather, pieces of a previously intact plastic jug) flying as far as twenty or thirty feet. This ain't your granddaddy's .22, my friends.
Did it relieve some stress? A little. It forced me to calm down and concentrate on something. It forced me to be slow, calculated, and precise. It also reminded me of one of the things that I'm really somewhat good at: near-surgical accuracy with two out of three rounds... On open sights. With a scope, I'm downright lethal. I've taken down a deer and an elk, each with one shot. The shot that took that elk (scoped) was damn near poetry in motion; Lycan and his Wulf Pack couldn't have been any more prodigious at a hunting if they were wearing little wulf running shoes by New Balance.
Now if I could just be a little less erratic with a 9 mil, I'd be ready to audition for the Navy SEALs. That's right, folks, I said audition. Knowing now just how talented I am with high caliber rifles, do you really want to call me on it?
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home