My first shooting targets!!

We went down to the range, Pat ran through a magazine with his P22, and I just had to shoot. He ran through the next one slowly, showing me the procedure and everything, and the one after that was mine. His P22 is a LOT quieter than anything else I've ever heard at the range, practically no recoil as well. When I first walked into the range, all the gunfire was making me flinch a little, but as soon as he started shooting that cute little .22, nothing startled me anymore. My first clip, I couldn't even tell if I was hitting the target, my goggles had begun to fog up, and of course I had no idea what I was doing. My second clip was better, I was much more comfortable with the gun already. My third clip was just plain fun :)


I think that at about this point the guy in the booth next to us started firing his .45. Talk about BARK! But it never made me flinch :) The pressure waves coming off of it were pretty impressive tho, you could definitly feel it every time he fired if you were shooting. I spent all 3 of these clips trying to find out why in the heck I was still hitting to the right. Everything seemed to be sighted up properly. In retrospect, even Pat was shooting to the left at first that day, I'm thinking maybe the front sight was a little off. See, his P22 has the extended barrel, so the front sight is on a removable piece so that you can mount a silencer. Mmmmm silencer... Not like the P22 needs one! So anyway, I was having a lot of fun. One of Pat's coworkers showed up for his first shooting lesson as well, so we all just kept rotating through.


The first magazine on this target really irritates me. If it weren't for that one stray round all the way at the top, it woulda been a very nice little grouping. Oh well, can't win 'em all ;) At this point, Pat started practicing speed shooting at 40ft range, and I thought it would teach me more to fire at a longer range (wanted to be able to see more easily where my shots were going while I was shooting). So for my second and third magazines I shot at 40ft. I expected to get some misses, but managed to keep all my bullets on the paper, if not in the target ;)


I'm pretty sure that for both of these magazines the front sight was very loose, but I didn't notice it until the second magazine, when it literally spun 90 degrees on me. I was still shooting at 40ft, and one of the bullets from my first magazine did miss the target completely :( During the second magazine, I pretty much had to manually realign the sights between each shot, so that's my excuse for that HORRIBLE spread. Allen, Pat's coworker, shot next and had the same problem, so we all decided to call it a day. I went through 110 rounds, and I can't WAIT to go shooting again. I will probably go at least once while Pat's away in Hawaii, and I'm already dreaming about picking up a CCWP and my own fun little .22 to plink stuff with ;D That'll have to wait for a while, but oh well :) When Pat gets back from his vacation, we're gonna buy some cheap stuffed animals and gather up a buncha soda bottles, then head out to the desert and actually do some damage. You just can't do a satisfying amount of damage to a paper target with a .22 ;)