Runnin' and Gunnin'

Our friend Barry is the gun totin' type.  He made a bunch of targets and goes out shooting every so often.  He invited me to go with him on Saturday to do some shooting, but also to take some pictures and video.  We went with him and some others.  We drove out into the Central Valley to some Bureau of Land Management land where it's legal to shoot.  So it's pretty much a desolate set of hills and canyons which make nice backstops.

We set up a pistol and rifle course to run through.  I had not shot a pistol before this so I was fairly lousy with it, but I was a little better on the rifle.  Because of my lack of experience I did the course with a .22 pistol and a .22 rifle.  But later on I was able to fire an assault rifle, a .45 pistol, a 9mm pistol, and a .357 magnum revolver.  Those are pretty fun guns to shoot--the .357 really packs a punch.

Here are my favorite pictures and the video of my run through the course is at the end, you won't want to miss that, I'm sure.

Barry fires a shot

A box of .22 rounds

Jess particularly appreciates this one

Barry taking advantage of the bipod, notice the shell ejecting across his beard.

Tad lines up his shot

And the aftermath

We were out pretty much the whole day, we left town before sunrise and got back after sunset.  It was long and exhausting.  The high temperature out there was in the 97-99F range.  I did pretty well with the help of my Subway visor and my polarizing sunglasses, but by mid-afternoon I had a pounding headache behind my eyes.  I'm just not used to that much intense sunlight.

I also made a rookie mistake of taking ibuprofen (for said headache) on an empty stomach.  That made for a rather unpleasant experience of focusing on keeping my stomach calm while riding home, exacerbated by the fact that nausea is a symptom of severe dehydration and it wasn't immediately obvious whether it was the ibuprofen or if the 5L of water / gatorade I drank wasn't enough to keep me hydrated.  But the nausea subsided half way home and I haven't experienced any additional issues, so I guess I'm alright.

And now the moment you've been waiting for: Kyle's run-n-gun, with the oh-so-manly .22 pistol and .22 rifle (which I managed to drop the magazine out of while swinging it off my back).  I don't think I did too badly having never fired a pistol until this day.  I did a lot better later after practicing and learning how to properly fire and suppress the instinct to compensate for kickback before the shot occurs (not that the .22 has much kickback, but those larger ones sure do).

Okay, so I had uploaded the video to Blogger to embed here for you, but Blogger re-encoded it and it looks like garbage.  So instead, you'll have to download it to watch it: Kyle's Video. You can try just clicking the link and watching it in your browser or you can "right click -> Save file as..." to download it and watch it in a video player.  The file is 86.2 MB so it may take a few of minutes to download (depending on your Internet connection speed).