Up in Arms

On Saturday morning at 7:45 (too freakin early) I met up at the church with some other women from the ward for a shooting class. There were 8 of us, along with one of the men from the ward. We drove to Springville to a shooting range and had a private tutorial from the owner of the place.

We met in a classroom first, where he tried to teach us how to determine which was our dominant eye (mine is my right eye) and hilarity ensued. It was such a comedy of errors as most of the women could not figure it out. It was a tad confusing, and there was much "left no right, but wait if the target disappears when I close this eye then what?" I think everyone got it figured out, but the couple of us who had it figured out thought it was pretty funny.


We were then outfitted in ear and eye protection which proved to be highly flattering to me...not.


We received some instruction from the guy from our ward, though I mainly benefited from Tonya's (dark ponytail in photo below) expertise since she definitely knew what she was doing. She brought her own rifle, pistol and ammo (ammunition for you lay folk) and taught me how to load the bullets, hold the guns, aim and fire. She's very impressive.


Since there were so few of us we didn't really have to take turns, we all had our own little shooting cubby. (I'm sure that's the official term.)


I was rather taken with the whole scene and was so glad I brought my camera. This was so NOT your mother's Enrichment Class!


This is me shooting a .22 pistol, which was surprisingly easy to do. I felt like an officer seen on TV, but different.

I also shot a cowboy-type pistol that I loaded myself and had to cock back before shooting (ala Clint Eastwood).

Here is my target.

This is me being like Sarah Prine, but with a scope! (Remember that scene where the rattlesnake is on the rocking chair with her toddler? I got him!)

Shooting is very loud! Also, you can see a small flame when the bullet first "fires". I tried to get a picture of that, but it was too fast for my camera. There's also smoke and a definite scent that come after a gun is fired. Things like this are just kind of cool to experience, as long as it's in a very safe setting right?

Not something I've ever seen before.

At the end of our session the owner brought out one of his HK MP5 sub machine guns (I had to ask Randy about this because I was clueless). But it's the kind of gun that S.W.A.T. teams use because the bullets come out fast (like a machine gun) but don't penetrate more than 2 walls thickness; so if they're doing a drug bust or something they don't kill the neighbors too (yikes). It was truly bizarre to hold and shoot such a big gun, but it was really easy to do once they showed me how to hold it.


Here's our group photo from the end of our session. It was totally worth getting up so early on a Saturday for (even though I couldn't sleep until after 3:00am #$@!).

Edited to add: This was for an Enrichment group class and was advertised as "Being like Annie Oakley". It wasn't about learning how to kill, it was just about learning something new.

**Have you ever been shooting?
Do you know which is your dominant eye?
What do you think??**