An Educational Excursion
A couple of months ago my husband returned from his weekly Friday night coaching session at the local gun range. All winter he coaches young people in the art of competitive rifle and pistol marksmanship. With the season over he apparently did not yet have his fill of observing trigger-controlling neophytes clutch firearms of various calibers and try to score points by hitting targets, for this is what befell my ears:
"Hey hun, I signed us up for a family trap shooting class."
"We are going to shoot traps? Fred off of Scooby Doo will be horrified!" I replied drolly. I knew full well what trap shooting was, however, one must keep up contentious spouse appearances. It's for the children.
My Polynesian husband projected me a "look." Here is that same look captured on the face of another relatively famous person of Polynesian descent:
My husband is more than slightly proficient with firearms. He shot competitively throughout high school, spent his career in the military, owned a gun store, was a firearms instructor, is now a 4H shooting sports leader, and is a certified range safety officer that does all manner of volunteer work for everyone from the Boy Scouts to the local shooting clubs. Both of my children shoot competitively, and are rather well versed in the utilization and safety of boom sticks. Me, well, I can use a gun safely, but as a right handed, left eye dominant person, let's just say that the awkward is for real.
The husband thought we would like trap shooting though, and also thought it was an activity that we could all do together. I'm always up for trying something new, and was pretty excited to get a lesson from a lady at a skeet and trap club.
We pulled into the local skeet and trap club one fine, recent Saturday morning for our "lesson." This might be time to mention a peculiar quirk about our family; we might project that we know absolutely nothing about whatever it is that we are doing. My husband is the most laid back person I have ever met, I kind of think it is the Hawaiian who spent a good chunk of time in a war zone mentality thing that makes him project this "could care less chill." My children, they are super laid back too, probably because their lives are not complicated nor full of strife, and me, well I'm a twitchy little squirrel-hobbit of barely contained unease.
This projection of chill (and in my case almost contained spazziness), makes a lot of people develop interesting first impressions of our abilities. This phenomenon played out as our lesson progressed.
Our instructor was Rhonda, and she was incredibly knowledgeable and competent. We patiently listened to her, told her how the children had never shot a shotgun before, how I was pretty much a noob at everything, and my husband managed to be conspicuously absent for most of the initial "talk." Rhonda's demeanor, although welcoming, could not be described as warm, and I smiled multiple times inwardly thinking that she must have thought we were gung ho newbies with not a lick of gun safety training or knowledge between us.
We walked outside to the trap field and the hubs and I let the children go first. Apparently it is a big deal to even hit a clay pigeon when you shoot trap for the first time, or so Rhonda said, so when our son annihilated 14 of them on his first ever trap shoot round and first time with a shotgun, I was slightly proud.
I noticed Rhonda kept looking at us with a little crinkle of puzzlement on the edges of her shrewd eyes. We just smiled and waved. Although, I have to admit that I was rather fascinated by this group of people clumped together to our right. They were all dressed in the exact same shade of khaki cargo pants, they all had on black polo shirts, and they were all armed like a Hollywood version of a special forces team. Curious.
My attention returned to trap shooting, as it was my turn to give it a try. Full GK disclosure here, I feel incredibly awkward handling firearms. It's the whole having to shoot with my left hand thing. I still managed to blast five pigeons out of the sky, and I really enjoyed the whole point and shoot aspect of trap shooting, and I even got a compliment from Instructor Rhonda about my "indexing."
The great personality warming of our instructor happened in full when it was the husband's turn to shoot. He blew all five of the clay birds out of the sky, and continued to do so with each position that we worked through (There were five). The look on Rhonda's face was priceless as she stepped back and looked at all of us again. We just smiled blankly in return.
Shooting trap is a lot of fun! There is nothing quite like lining up and trying to get ahead of the bird. It is quite a bit different than shooting rifle and pistol as you point and pull the trigger instead of aim and squeeze. My daughter and I were enthusiastically invited to a ladies trap clinic in September, and we are going! Rhonda, as she jotted our info down, said she was glad we were coming and was going to put us in:
"The advanced trap class."
It was then that she saw me staring at the khaki commandos once again. We had been talking about the differences between shooting shotgun verses rifle and pistol. She said:
"See that group of people over there? Well, if you need a swat team or to invade a small country, they would be who you would call. They are very well trained marksmen. However, they have a hard time shooting shotgun, so that's why they are here."
The group of folks that were prepared for imminent doom were from a local company that offered firearms training services. Apparently it can be difficult for tactically trained people to grasp shooting shotgun because it is a different method of shooting. I can understand that, what I was trying to wrap my brain around was why in the world one of the storm troopers needed 6 pistol magazines and two tactical knives on his person to go to a shotgun shooting instructional class. They all clinked like tank tracks when they walked by, and I wondered if there were hidden armaments on their persons as well.
We are going to be taking a special trip this winter, a trip that I will be writing about in future posts, and most of the places that we will be staying have a skeet and trap range. I am looking forward to some friendly family competition on the range, and maybe spying a khaki commando or two in their non-native habitat.
And as always, all of the images in this post, unless otherwise cited, were taken on the author's almost as twitchy and gunpowder scented iPhone.