New Shooter Day Range Report

On Saturday, September 24, me and a couple of friends put on our annual “New Shooter Day.” Every year, Oddball and I like to take newbies out and let them get some good exposure to the awesomeness that is shooting. This year I think we had two that had never fired a gun before and three who had extremely limited experience. In total we had ten people, including my last new shooter.

Our goal with these events is to teach proper handling and safety with little emphasis on accuracy. We just want them to have fun without getting frustrated. We also want them to get trigger time on lots of different kinds of guns.

We started off with a safety briefing that went over the basic rules and the range rules. After we moved the group onto the firing line, I demonstrated a few of the firearms so the newbies could get an idea of the amount of noise and recoil they should expect. I learned a very valuable lesson here: try out your new guns before taking new shooters. Both the M&P15-22 and the Stevens 95 had embarrassing problems. The Stevens either has a problem with the extractor or a problem with the operator. The M&P15-22 was having an issue where sometimes the trigger didn’t reset properly–I had to physically push the trigger forward for it to reset. After about 15 rounds and a generous helping of lubricant that problem was resolved. I suspect that after a few hundred rounds the trigger will smooth out.

After the demonstration, we let the newbies start off shooting .22 pistols. I have a Walther P-22 that was having slight issues with the Remington High Velocity Golden Bullets but after we figured out the ammo was the culprit it worked pretty well.

I met Chase a week before New Shooter Day. I stopped by The Hacker Consortium for a bit and started talking to him. He mentioned that he’d never shot a gun before, so I invited him along. He’s from Illinois and was pretty disappointed when I told him about what his state would require if he wanted to buy a firearm.

Our friend Critch came along and brought his Ruger .22 to play with.

Oddball calls Cassondra his greatest success. She went from terrified of guns to gun owner in one range session a while ago. She now owns a .22 rifle but wanted to learn about pistols, so that’s what she worked on.

After everyone got a chance to shoot the .22’s, we moved on to carbines. I broke out the M4gery and gave a recoil demonstration where I put the butt of the stock in my crotch and fired a few rounds. I saw this done when I was in basic training and it always stuck with me, so I figured I’d use it to show the newbies that .223 is nothing to be scared of. I got a lot of laughs 😀

Here I am showing Sarah how the EOTech works:

People love the EOTech.

Here she is shooting it. Notice the brass in the air:

While I was teaching Sarah about the AR15 system, Oddball was on the 50 yard range letting Chase and his girlfriend Kim play with the .40cal Beretta carbine:

All in all, it was a good day. The newbies also got to shoot some battle rifles like the AK, Nagant, M1 Carbine, and an Enfield in .308. Sorry, no pictures for that. I would like to thank Patrick for having the foresight to actually bring a camera since I was too busy teaching to break out my phone. He did a lot better than I would have.

Oh, and we didn’t have to use the target stands.