Our day at the shooting range

Only one post later and I've already crossed off one of my life goals!

Unless you live under a rock, you've probably seen (or subscribe to) one of those "daily deal" type newsletters. You know, the ones with local things to do or food to eat on the cheap? And you only have 24 hours to "buy" the deal? I fell for it and subscribed to one, and never found anything worth buying. In fact, they wanted me to buy something so bad that they sent me a $10 off coupon to use on my first purchase. While this sounds like a good idea in theory, it actually made me more hesitant to buy something. I wanted to hoard that $10 off until I found the *perfect* deal. After months of half-price hamburgers and discounted disco lessons, each one making me wonder whether it was worthy of the coupon, I finally found something that seemed suitable... a day for two at the shooting range, including gun rental and ammo. 

 Before that day at the shooting range, I have to admit, I was pretty nervous around guns. Okay that's a lie, they scared the crap out of me. I was so nervous that I was going to somehow accidentally shoot myself in the foot or something. That might sound a little dramatic, but you have to realize that I've never really been around a gun before. Sure, my dad has a gun (which he never shoots and probably doesn't even have ammo for, it's more of an antique, passed down through family sort of thing), but he's always kept it so hidden and secretly locked away so that my sister and I would never be able to find it. I've only seen it once when he took it out recently to show it to Shane. Despite all the worry and the fear, I felt like this was something I really needed to try. Even if it was just once and I hated it, that would be the first and last time I would ever have to do it.

When the big day came, I had no idea what to expect, except maybe lots of blood and my big toe in a cooler on the way to the hospital. And if you've never been to a shooting range before, it can be a bit alarming when you walk in and hear all the "bang! bang! bang!"  It was a pretty busy day too, so the lobby was full of burly looking men cleaning their guns. The fact that there was a Girl Scout (in her vest and everything!) in the lobby helped to ease my worries a little, but not much. Then the nice people working there gave us a quick lesson on safety and how to use a gun. They taught us everything we needed to know about shooting a .22 semi-automatic handgun. That's when it started to get real. This was all happening too fast. There were all these things to worry about, like making sure the safety was turned on or off, or not accidentally squeezing the trigger, or having the correct thumb position to avoid serious injury. That was not what I pictured at all. 

As luck would have it, they ran out of semi-automatics and had us use a revolver instead. Turns out those are a lot easier (and a lot more fun, I'm assuming) to shoot. Shane has used a revolver before, so he went first to demonstrate. Yet another in the list of a million reasons why I am so glad to have him around.

With Shane's help, I was loading that revolver like a Wild West cowboy in no time. 

With a bit of practice, I even did pretty good actually shooting what I was aiming for. It's really satisfying to look at the target and see a lot of bullet holes around the big X in the middle. That target is now hanging in our entryway, so it can, as Shane said, "let intruders know what they've got coming."

The whole day was AWESOME. It was way way less scary than I imagined it to be (most things usually are) and I didn't even injure myself a tiny bit. And I'm ready to go back and do it all again!