Bad Influence

So this week-end, I did much good gun stuff.

I know... I do much gun stuff every week-end. It's what I do. Either gun stuff or airplane stuff of dog stuff comprises most of my free time.

Well this time, Nicki was along. We went shooting and I gave her carte blanche to try anything in the gun room that struck her fancy. She's now decided that she absolutely must have a Model 1911 .45, hopefully as a replacement for those effective but dull Glocks of hers. She also took a liking to the M1 Carbine and the SKS.
Here she is, killing targets downrange with my ex-Yugoslavian M59 SKS. ----->




For my part, I took along an old World War two-vintage M1 Garand--one that I've had for several years but never actually shot before.This particular Garand came from the Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP) back in the day, and while I was quite pleased to see that it was a Winchester rifle with what was probably the original bolt and barrel and the nice green parkerized finish, a check with the bore gauges indicated that the throat and muzzle were both heavily worn to the point where I simply relegated it to the display rack without even bothering to see how it shot. It sat there for probably eight or nine year until Friday, when on an impulse, I grabbed it and took it out to the range, basically just to play with it and pot-shot at whatever targets of opportunity presented themselves. However I was shocked to find that despite it's badly worn barrel, it was dead-bang accurate and almost invariably put round after round into some old plastic laundry detergent jugs and small boxes at both one hundred and two hundred meters. That just goes to show that you can't always judge a rifle just by the amount of indicated wear in the barrel--this one still shoots good enough to use in the local CMP matches. Nicki shot it too but she seems to think that the M1 Garand is a mite too much rifle for her. I can understand that. The M1 is a man's rifle and she is, after all, just a girl.

After the shooting, we took in a classic guy movie that Nicki had never seen before: The Wild Geese, with Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Roger Moore and Hardy Kruger. She actually got teary-eyed when Richard Harris died on the airport runway, screaming his son's name as Richard Burton emptied an Uzi into him. It was cute.

Saturday we went to the gun show in Chantilly. Neither of us bought anything because the prices were high and the selection on things that I needed was poor. There were very little in the way of ammunition and even less when it came to reloading supplies. One dealer had a few boxes of Winchester small rifle primers on his table and I had to ask the price because I was sure that I was reading the sticker wrong. But he confirmed that he was charging $135.00 for a thousand primers. As the normal price is about twenty to thirty dollars per thousand, I let the profiteer know what he could do with his primers and anything else on his table. Pity, because he did have several other things that I might have bought in a package deal with a box or two of reasonably-priced primers. His loss, but that's what happens when you get greedy.
Bridget and her guy were supposed to join us there but bailed on us, allegedly "sick". (insert rolling eyes emoticon here.)

And after spending all this time with Nicki and giving her some good shooting tips, does she thank me or tell me how great I am?

Uh, yeah. As if. But she gets points for the attitude.

Later that evening, a nice Thai dinner settled her down a bit and served to put a nice cap on the evening.

Now it's Sunday and I have to spend most of the day doing household and yard work and giving Lagniappe some attention since he was badly neglected this weekend, but I figured that I could spare a few minutes to blog about the past couple of pretty nice days.