Range Day....

Click to Enlarge I took the Kimber, the Colt Trooper, and the Smith mouse gun up to the range in Lakewood today. I had mentioned (bragged? -ed) in a comment to a thread on Say Uncle that I could put all my shots from the mouse gun in a shirt pocket at 7 yards. Uncle was trying to decide on a Kel-Tec buy or a Snubbie. I voted Snubbie. He went for the little automatic, for good reasons, and followed up with several posts on how it worked out. As for the shirt pocket, I can do it; but I hadn't in a while. I threw the Model 36 in the range bag along with a couple of house guns to give them all a try. A mini-Q target at 7 yards offhand. The Kimber Stainless II shot one hole (one big honkin' hole) The Colt .357 Trooper with a 4 inch barrel shot a long hole with 5 and a sixth a bit away (my bad). The Smith put all of it's shots in the space of a shirt pocket. I've still got it. The Smith shot into a 2 1/4 X 1 3/8 group...easily a shirt pocket. Maybe you think that 7 yards ain't far, but I do most of my off-hand pistol practice at 7 and 10 yards...cuz that's well within where the action is*. At rest the Colt and the 1911 are like rifles at 25 yards. If I just want to tear big holes in targets, nothing beats the CommieWeeniePistol^TM for fun. The couple at the next station were shooting a pair of Glock 23s (my son has one) and the young lady told me she had never shot a revolver....so, I let them shoot the Colt. She liked it. I have found that the younger shooters don't think wheel-guns are modern and cool. I think they are perfect. The only thing that I have that comes close to revolver reliability is the Makarov, but it shoots a round a bit weaker than I would like, and it's also a bit awkward (heavy for it's size) to carry on a light-clothes day...at least for me. I'm not generally a Glock fan, I don't like its looks or its trigger; but I was pretty impressed with how fast they could get double-taps...altho the accuracy was so-so. Mr. Kimber was about 10 times more accurate (or I was) but there is no way that big .45 is going to get back on target that fast. *The FBI study "In the Line of Fire: Violence Against Law Enforcement (1997) found that the majority of officer involved shootings happen at 10 feet or less and in the dark or under poor lighting conditions and are over in an average time of 7 seconds.