Trigger time!...

... Finally! As I've said, I've been getting slack about shooting in a disciplined manner. Sure, I'll take a gun out & go "plinking" once in a while. That's not why I bought a gun, though. Granted, I like nothing more than taking the little .22 lever-action rifle out for an hour or so of shooting at a pop can. But I bought my first "real" gun because I realized I might actually have to kill a rapist. I'm getting off track, here, but...

I bought my first "real" gun (a Kimber Ultra Carry in .45 ACP, which I still carry pretty often) when my wife & I lived in an apartment in Columbia, SC. We thought we'd moved to a pretty good area. After living there for a couple of months, a woman was raped at an adjacent complex. Then another. Then an attack on another woman. In one attack, the guy just knocked on the door, and when the woman answered, he came in, pulled a gun, tied the "man" of the house up in the bathroom & raped the woman. The police couldn't seem to catch the guy.

Well, if you've read my profile, you've seen that I'm a 2-time cancer survivor. Nothing makes a person understand the true meaning of helplessness like cancer. I'll be the first to admit that being a cancer survivor makes me a bit of a control freak. OK, a nearly total control freak. So, as you can imagine, the very idea of being tied up in the bathroom and listening to my wife being raped literally made my blood boil.

Well, all that raping caused my inner control freak to ... well .. freak out. I went to a firearms dealer and bought the biggest caliber I could handle, in a package small enough to conceal. That's my Kimber. Anyway, I went on to get my South Carolina Concealed Weapons Permit (as did Miss Fluffy, but that's another post), and my firearms passion just grew from there.

Geez... slight tangent there. Sorry - it's a holiday weekend, and I've got a (formerly) full bottle of bourbon...

My most valuable firearm, in terms of money invested and utility, is, without question, my Bushmaster AR-15 (pictured). It's a clone of the modern M-16 M4 variant -- we shooters call it an "M-4-gery." It fires the ubiquitous .223 Rem/5.56 NATO cartrige. When my beloved wife, Miss Fluffy, gave it to me for Christmas, the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban (arguably the silliest legislation in American history) was still in effect. Since then, I've customized it to be a formidable Homeland Defense Rifle. Yeah, I phrase it that way deliberately.

So, it was my beloved M4-gery that I shot today. I'm fortunate enough to have land-lots-o-land on which to shoot. Not only that, but I have access to an old, dilapidated house which my family used to rent to farm hands. It's in quite a state of disrepair, and hasn't been used in probably over 50 years. I set up a scenario in which I had to use my rifle-mounted light & engage a target immediately to my left.

The only problem is that the house is so old that every time I'd shoot, it would literally rain dust. I'd fire 3 rounds (2 to center mass, 1 to the head, in proper "tactical" manner), and then go back outside until I could breathe.

Good times, nonetheless.

For those of you who are disturbed by the fact that I, as a "civilian", practice the act of shooting another human being twice in the chest and once in the head ... I'll have a post for you in the near future explaining it all. Until then, read some accounts of those rendered helpless by the recent New Orleans disaster. It won't change your way of thinking, but I'll spew about it, anyway... and my dreaded "assault rife" is all legal, so HAHA!! MOLON LABE!!