A Good Morning On The Range

Instead of our regular Friday morning meeting, I took five members of a business networking group I'm a part of to the range this morning as a get out of the office event.

A few of them had never shot before, and a couple had either as hunters and one as a more Gen2 type shooter.

In short it was a great time.

We hit the rifle range first. I let them shoot one of my ARs, the AK and the Tavor on the rifle range. That's another 100 flawless rounds through the Tavor.

Everyone thought the Tavor was very cool and one of the guys that owned an AR was very impressed with it.

One of the guys brought along a GSG MP-5 in .22. It was a blast to shoot - lots of fun, ridiculously easy to control and just a fun gun. I could ring the steel plates at 100 yards no problem. It had quite a few failures to feed, most likely due to the ersatz lead round nose budget 22s that was all he could find to shoot through it, so can't blame the gun for that.

One not so funny event happened. One of the guys had brought his deer rifles out to sight in (He's a deer season only shooter). His first rifle had some serious functioning problems due to a complete lack of lubrication. It was so dry the bolt would not close on a round. I put on some Slip2000 EWL and it functioned like a champ.

The second rifle was a different story.

He fired a round and it worked ok, but the second round he tried to fire jammed completely and could neither be fired nor extracted, so he had a live round stuck in the chamber.

The round would not come out of the chamber no matter what - prying with knives and multi-tools did nothing, nor did a rod down the barrel. It was jammed in tight. I couldn't figure out how it could be so jammed into the chamber like that.

It was a 308 Winchester round, which he swore was the caliber of the rifle.

I took a look at the markings on the barrel and guess what? It wasn't chambered in 308. The rifle was chambered in 30-06.

Be sure you check you've put the right ammo in the gun folks.

Then we headed to the pistol range and had a blast. I set up a couple plate racks, then added some poppers and supervised them shooting at them in a friendly competition as to who could knock 'em all down with 10 shots on 8 targets. They had a great time shooting.

One of the guys brought a few interesting pistols - A Walther PPX, a S&W Shield and a SiG 239.

I got to try out the Walther PPX. If you're following Tam (and if you're not, you should) you know about the Walther PPX and can see how she's putting one through its paces. Handling the PPX was interesting. While it looks blocky as heck, the grip fit my hand like a glove and the trigger was truly and impressively excellent, I'd say certainly better than a stock Glock trigger. Knocking down plates quickly with accuracy was no problem.

The Shield was also easy to shoot as was his Sig 938.

I brought along my 9mm S&W M&P, my Glock 19 and two 1911s.

The 1911s were a big hit. But they had problems clearing all 8 targets with just the 8 shots in its magazine.

After putting hundreds of rounds through the guns it was time to head back to work. Now I've got quite a few guns to clean.

Everyone had a great time at the range and agreed that it kicked the Group's golf outing's butt and that we should do it again.