I spent the day at the gun range with my kids and coauthor Mike Kupari.
I used to practice a lot. Back when I was shooting competition or teaching I spent a lot of time at the range. At one point I was pretty damned good. After I got out of the gun business I didn’t shoot nearly as much. Frankly, launching a writing career sucked up most of my time, and after doing it full time for a few years I was burned out. I still shot often enough to stay proficient, but sitting at a keyboard all day, I wasn’t the speed machine I used to be.
But my kids are getting older, so for the last year I’ve recommitted to shooting at least a couple times a month so that I could get them up to speed. We’ve been having a lot of fun with it, and they’re actually getting good.
All this means that I’ve been getting back into the groove too. It turned out that once I started practicing regularly again I’m still pretty good at this stuff. It is like riding a bicycle. Only I was always really bad at riding a bicycle, but really fast and accurate with a gun.
I don’t put pictures of my kids on the internet, (I’ve got way too many crazy people who hate me, so they all post under fake names) but they’re all looking pretty bad ass.
My oldest, we’ll call her Correia 2.1, is getting good enough that I’m going to start taking her to pistol matches this year. I’ve had her try out everything, but she is taking after her father and so far appears to be a 1911 fan. Which I think might just be an excuse for her to claim that Dragon Leatherworks Sad Puppies holster I was given as a gift.
2.2 is a Smith & Wesson M&P girl. She’s our lefty, which caused some trouble at the beginning because I was trying to teach her on a Buckmark. But holy moly, over the last year she’s taken off. The girl is a fast learner. She is also the recoil junky, and she loves my Crusader Broadsword AR-10, which at about 75 cents a round gets expensive very quickly.
Here’s one of Correia 2.3, which I can post because you can’t see his face. He’s 10. So far he is more comfortable with rifles than pistols, but he’s getting pretty decent with both. (Rock River heavy barrel 20 inch, Tactical Innovations suppressor)
Today we worked on transition drills, random number of rounds in the rifle mag, shoot to empty, drop and transition to pistol. Mike snapped some shots.
It started coming back to me. Ha! Look at that. Last piece of brass still in the air and already starting the draw stroke. That’s a Daniel Defense V11 with an Aimpoint Micro I picked up last month. I’ve got some rail covers and a VFG coming for the keymod forearm, because that sucker gets hot fast. Very nice gun. If you’re in Utah, Bob at Sandy Shooters Supply has really good deals on DD stuff.
3 pieces of brass in the air, pistol barely moving, all hits. But to be fair, this is my custom STI 2011 4.15 (the Lorenzo gun for those of you who’ve read Dead Six) which is a fantastic gun. George Hill once referred to in a pistol class of his as my Cheater Heater. Probably because it holds a box of ammo, recoils like a .22, and I can keep up an accurate rate of fire that sounds like an UZI. 🙂
Overall, really good shooting day. When I did some slow fire pistol, I shot a group I could cover with my thumb from 20. The accuracy was still there and my old speed is starting to come back.
Mike with his PTR-91. But then he had some bad luck and got into a car accident on the way home. He’s fine, but his front body panel is toast and we had to bend it out with a crow bar so he could drive it. It wasn’t his fault. An oncoming car turned left directly in front of him while he was going straight down the highway. He hit the brakes and swerved, so he barely scraped them instead of hitting head on. That was lucky. If he’d not reacted in time he would’ve t-boned them.
He sent me a text that he made it home fine, and next time he’ll accept my wife’s invitation to stay for dinner. 🙂
