Hey, all!
My first range report, so please be merciful. LOL
Okay, a bit of background information first, it'll be relevant later. First, I have pretty limited firearms experience, all of it stemming from my time in the Army. Even then, I'm more familiar with the M-16 than say the Beretta 92FS, since I used the M-16 far more than the Beretta. On top of that, all of that experience was back in the mid-90's, so I'm quite rusty. At this point, I'm pretty much starting over again.
Okay, that out of the way, on to my report!
As some of you know, I picked up a S&W Sigma 9MM at the Orlando Gun Show the last time they were in the area, back in late November. For various budgetary reasons, I haven't been able to get it to the range until Wednesday, the 31st (Talk about ending the year with a bang! LOL).
I met up with my wife's cousin at The Shooting Gallery, across the street from the Orange Co jail. The staff there are really good guys even if the range itself is a bit meh. Decent prices, though.
I had picked up a box of 250 Remington UMC cartridges over at Walmart previously, so I had planned to put 200 of them downrange, keeping the remaining 50 for later. The general idea was to get a feel for my new battle buddy, get re-acquainted with shooting, and the like, not to mention have a bit of fun in the process.
My wife's cousin had brought with him his Taurus 24/7 9mm and his 12 gauge, plus a few boxes of cartridges (The brand names escape me at the moment).
We set up shop, and start to let them fly. He starts off by shooting the Taurus off first, and the first clip goes by quite nicely, and gets a pretty decent grouping. The second clip starts to give him a bit of problems, as the slide isn't quite returning back to where it should return to (Sorry, don't know the technical term for that), requiring him to push the slide the rest of the way back to the ready state with his thumb. It's odd, but it only happened once, so we shrug it off.
It was my turn, and I let my own cartridges fly. The target is about 20 feet away, and my grouping isn't the best in the world, to say the least. =D
I'm pretty sure it's my grip, so I experiment around a bit, and my grouping improves some. Finally, the grouping gets somewhat consistent, but it's shooting a bit high and to the right, and that is consistent shot after shot. At this point I think the sights might need a slight adjustment, but then we get distracted by shooting the 12 gauge downrange with birdshot, buckshot, and solid slugs. =D
After the 12 gauge action is done and over with, we get back to shooting the Taurus. It starts to give him some serious trouble, eventually causing a cartridge to get stuck in the chamber and the action refusing to open. I tell him to just leave it pointing downrange and get the range master. He does, and the range master manages to clear it, noting that we might want to try a different brand of cartridges that he was using. I offer him my Remington cartridges, which works flawlessly. I then try his cartridges in my Sigma, and they all work flawlessly.
I ask him to take a few pictures of me putting several downrange, mainly so I could get a critique of my grip:
While taking these pictures, the cousin said that he saw that as soon as I compensated for the slight right and upward drift, it was steel on target.
Then I set the camera on the shelf, set it to video mode, then set it to record:
This video showed a great deal for the after-action review as to my grip. Apparently it's not 100% straight, as it's twisted a tiny bit. Also, after each shot, I don't return back to the same spot, and I drift quite a bit, especially while firing the second clip. Oh, the last few rounds in the second clip weren't being shot for any sort of accuracy, I just wanted to shoot them as fast as I could. =D
The cousin tried the Sigma, and in his hands, it was dead on-target, completely telling me that I need some work to do. We tried a mix of ranges, and out to 40 feet, it can get challenging to hit the X ring, especially with the factory sights, but it can certainly hit center body mass at that range just fine.
Overall, I'm more than quite pleased with it. Essentially out of the box, it shot just fine, with no problems whatsoever. I'm probably going to have to wait another month and a half to recover enough funds to head back to the range, so that's a bummer. On the plus side, I had loads of fun (Especially when we had a small audience when that 12 gauge was going off =D), and can't wait to go back.
As an afterward, I showed my sister-in-law the video, and she was surprised that you can shoot at a range without any sort of license or permit. So the next time I go to the range, she wants to tag along. =D
:drinks :thumsup
