Well that was fun. In fact it was a hell of a lot of fun. First read JayG’s AAR over at MArooned for a list of everyone who attended. I at least go to say hello to everyone, or at least almost everyone who was there. That’s the problem with any gathering of this sort. We were busying talking, shooting, talking some more, shooting some more, resetting targets, shooting some more, talking some more while having lunch, back to shooting and talking. I’m sure there is video on one of the blogs of the now de riqueur bayonet charge. We also had the obligatory sacrifice of the stuffed toys, with a special guest appearance by a toy guitar.  Lot’s of copper and lead went down range and lot’s of brass and a lesser amount of steel casings along with some plastic shot gun shells hit the ground. Many wide grins were shared by all along with lots of oohs and aaahs from looking at some neat firing irons of all types.

Special thanks to Double Trouble and the Mrs. for welcoming us to their abode and doing everything they could to ensure a good time. Special, special thanks to JayG for taking on the insanity of organizing this group. If organized we were.

It was nice to meet Bubble Head Les and see Libertyman, Wally, Aaron, JD and his daughter, Kyle, OldNFO, Zercool, Mopar and Cher, Brad_MA, and everyone else.

Aaron and Wally have the best toys, but OldNFO brought his FN SCAR17 which was a lot of fun to shoot. Even if I didn’t hit anything with it. As was the 1911 he let me fire. Yeah, that’s a hair trigger on that. I have to beg old age because I can’t remember who let me fire the FN 5.7. While it might be a .22 on steroids, it’s 20 round magazine prompted me to call it the Phaser of semi autos. I thought that it was never going to run out of ammo. And it’s accurate. Fun to shoot, but too spendy for me. Still, I was glad to have a chance to try it out.

I shared table space with OldNFO and so got to hear him give some pointers on rifle marksmanship to one of the other shooters. Some of it was what I had learned at an Appleseed last year, but he had a bunch of other pointers that helped me with my rifle shooting. If I can remember them all, I can actually hit what I am aiming at. Practice, practice, practice. Which will also help my annoying tendency to flinch downward when I pull the trigger. When I remember to control that, I’m actually fairly accurate even though we were shooting at fairly short range.

As it happens, I brought along a few rifles that I wanted to wring out a bit and hoped that I’d get some pointers from the experienced riflemen.

Thanks to some helpful tips from other attendees, my shooting skills and comfort with rifles is increasing all the time.  That’s not only the beauty of the blogger shoot, it’s the kind of things shooters do in my experience.

Finally, I’m starting to like my AR-15. That’s a story for a post in itself, but thanks to Wally and Aaron  my apprehension about owning and firing an AR has been allayed. I think I put the most rounds through that of anything I brought.

One of the nicest things about blogger shoots is the constant “Hey, would you like to try this?” that goes on. Everyone offers to let anyone try out just about anything. Last year’s shoot convinced me that I just HAVE TO HAVE an M1 Carbine. It’s just a matter of finding one at a price I can afford, but that’s not part of this story.

I’m always amazed at the wide interests of my fellow bloggers and shooters, as well as the commenters. Engineers, computer scientists, chemist, machinists, and other wicked smaht people. Although it is sort of like an ADHD convention as the conversations veer from topic to topic without even a pause to mark the change. History, politics, guns (of course), cars, airplanes, boats, more politics, music, movies, you name it, someone discussed it. Jokes flew back and forth all day long.

This is one of the most enjoyable days of the year and everyone else seemed to agree as we stayed far past the originally planned end time.

The only things missing were Borepatch and Lissa and her cookies. Love those cookies. Even though they weren’t with us physically, they were in spirit.

As always everyone pitched in to help clean up and then it was over for another year. So many people, so much shooting, so much fun. I’m looking forward to next year already.