hmm nice weekend

[dragonlady7]

Briefly,

• It was nice to see kkatowll.
  
• My parents had a Blackhawk emergency-land in their back field last Wednesday. Weird, man. Weird. I saw the crop circle and the photos.
  
• My sister is more than six months pregnant and is still significantly skinnier than me. I spent the entire weekend trying to think of tasteless fat jokes and had limited-to-no success.
  
• I saw my childhood best friend. She has a two-month-old. This child is the most amazingly cute thing in the world. I was astonished by the cuteness.
  
• The train was nearly on time on the way home, but on the way out, it was half an hour early, which was somewhat confusing and inconvenient. Related: Why are there no signs whatsoever visible from the train? The only time you know where you are is when you've just passed a station, which on that route, averages out to like once an hour (Buffalo, then an hour, then Rochester, then two hours, then Syracuse... etc).
  
• My parents' cats are all ginormous and huge and old.
  
• My sister is still better at target shooting than me. Unsurprising.
  
• My uncle randomly decided my dad should look at and possibly sell this odd assortment of guns he had in his basement. The guns belonged to my grandfather, an avid skeet shooter whose collection of Remingtons fetched a nice price after his death. The guns remaining were odds and ends, strange one-offs, and, weirdly, mostly Winchesters, which my grandfather was not notably fond of. I am oddly filled with covetous desire for one of them, a turn-of-the-20th-century .22 rifle of diminutive size and workmanlike yet attractive design. Do I need a gun? Probably not really-- I don't know of any local shooting ranges and don't know any local Gun People and am not sure I want to.
  

Comments

[mother2012.livejournal.com]

Make you a deal. You procure one of those guns, in firing condition, and I'll get a gun, and we'll find a target range. I've been wanting to do that for years.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

All the guns seemed to be in firing condition, and we tried out almost all of the .22s-- there was a cute little rolling-block one, very old-fashioned, with no magazine-- you could only load it and fire it one bullet at a time. Dad pointed out that those had been state of the art just after the Civil War, and so people would wear belts of tiny loops with single bullets through them. I almost want to get a belt like that.
I actually think that gun might have had a Boy Scout label on it. One of them did.

Have you done much target-shooting? It was a rite of passage in my family-- first being old enough to come watch while Dad and the siblings old enough did it (and getting little jobs like loading the magazine or marking the targets), then being old enough to do it too, then my older sister was old enough to take us without Dad, then finally being old enough to learn to use the pistol-- but none of us ever really liked using the pistols. They're too big, too loud, too heavy, too threatening and way, way too hard to aim. And, Dad could never quite keep from mentioning that the ammunition was very expensive.
But for Christmas Dad got a .22 pistol, which uses the same ammunition as the rifles, and so I got to fire that this weekend. It was so much easier! I still sucked, but I could hit the target every time, at least. It's much lighter and quieter and doesn't kick so hard...
I still don't like pistols very much, though. They're just too easy to point the wrong direction.

[mother2012.livejournal.com]

Have you done much target-shooting?

No, I haven't. Haven't held a gun since I was 17, when my brothers and I would stand on the upper porch (three stories up) and shoot tin cans across an acre. I was pretty good at it then; I don't have any illusions about it now.

What I have is a feeling that a time is coming when I'm going to need to be able to shoot. 'Nuff said about that.

I just think it would be good for my ego to know that I can handle a gun. When I mentioned it a couple years ago, my army nephew told me what gun to get, but I'd have to call and ask him what it was. And then save the money.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Guns aren't cheap, no. I haven't looked into it at all, though.

I admit that when I was young, I would often be scared to be in the house alone-- as a teenager, I was often alone all day, and had an overactive imagination. It was a great consolation to me to know that I knew where the weapons were in the house, and where the ammunition was, and since the house was large and complicated, it was likely that if I knew there was someone coming or attacking or somewhere in the house up to no good, I would be much more likely to be able to slip around them and find at least the gun if not the ammo (and since I knew about guns, I'd be able to hide any indication that the gun was unloaded).

And nowadays I do get a little nervous, knowing that my only and best hope is the cast iron frying pan in the kitchen, or perhaps the big chopping knife in the kitchen drawer. I'm not so good with knives.

So I'd like to have a gun, just to have. But I don't really want a pistol, despite that being the most practical for self-defense-- they require a permit, and I'm just not that good with them. Most of them are very difficult to operate-- it takes me two hands to operate the safety on even the .22, and the .9mm requires so much hand strength I'm tempted to brace it against my leg-- which means that if I slipped, I'd shoot myself in the foot, which is really suboptimal. I have to basically put it down on a table in order to be able to turn the safety off-- which means that I just don't put the safety on, which is NOT very good at all!!!

I'd like to have a nice rifle I'd keep on the wall as decoration, and a box of bullets locked in a drawer by the bed. That's how I'd keep it.

(Dad keeps one of his pistols hidden in a compartment in his closet, with a full magazine but the chamber empty, and the other in a box at the back of a drawer, unloaded, with the ammunition at the back of another drawer.)

[mother2012.livejournal.com]

It was some kind of rifle that my nephew recommended. And it was a rifle that I handled way-back-when. I'm totally ignorant, not knowing that a pistol is harder to handle or what requires a permit.

But I'm quite serious. If you want to do this and remind me, I will get a rifle (I'm reminded that one isn't really supposed to call them 'guns') when I can come up with the money, which won't be this fall and probably not before Christmas.

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

You really shouldn't ask me if it's cool to get a gun and learn how to use it. I love bullfights, red meat and fried food!

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know how to use it, I just have never done any target shooting except at my father's house. There's a shooting range out back-- a jeep trail comes down a hill into a ravine, there's a stream at the bottom, and there's a large steep embankment up the other side where the jeep trail runs up sideways to a massive cornfield. So it's perfect for shooting-- there are flat spaces at very close range, for pistol work, then at slightly farther range, for beginners with rifles, and then you could set up a space farther up the first jeep trail for longer-range stuff, we just seldom bother. But any wild shots will go into that embankment, and the field behind is quite large-- the nearest houses beyond it are about a mile away, which is farther than the range of most of the weapons we fire. If someone comes down the jeep trail, which would be trespassing anyway, we can hear them before they're in danger. The only thing we really have to watch out for is animals, and they all run away when they hear the crack of gunfire.

But I've never gone to a real target range. I don't know what that would be like.

Guns...

[kittyc1978.livejournal.com]

My boss was wondering if there were any winchester side by side shot guns in your grandfather's collection...lever action, not pump...aparently he's not into their pump action ones...

Re: Guns...

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

No-- none of the Winchesters in the collection are shotguns. They're all rifles except for one carbine.

There are three shotguns in the collection but one is a rare Remington 20/20, one is an antique Belgian something in poor condition, and the third, I'm not sure what it is but it has a very long barrel and weird sights and is quite small-- my uncle thinks it might have been his when he was a boy, but he's not sure he ever used it. I don't think it's a Winchester.